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PAULO JOSÉ HAUSER BRODY

KING LEAR: DRAMATIC LITERATURE AS A TIME MACHINE

PORTO ALEGRE

2006

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UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DO RIO GRANDE DO SUL INSTITUTO DE LETRAS

PROGRAMA DE PÓS-GRADUAÇÃO EM LETRAS ÁREA DE ESTUDOS DE LITERATURA

ESPECIALIDADE: LITERATURAS ESTRANGEIRAS MODERNAS ÊNFASE: LITERATURAS DE LÍNGUA INGLESA

LINHA DE PESQUISA: LITERATURA, IMAGINÁRIO E HISTÓRI A

KING LEAR: DRAMATIC LITERATURE AS A TIME

MACHINE

Dissertação submetida à Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

como requisito parcial para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Letras

na ênfase Literaturas de Língua Inglesa

MESTRANDO: PAULO JOSÉ HAUSER BRODY

ORIENTADORA: SANDRA SIRANGELO MAGGIO

PORTO ALEGRE

2006

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Encontram-se disponibilizados para leitura através da Internet os seguintes trechos da

dissertação: Sumário, Prefácio, Introdução, Caps. 1, 2 e 3, e Obras Consultadas.

Os demais capítulos estão disponibilizados na forma impressa, juntamente com os acima

mencionados, na biblioteca da BSCSCH da UFRGS.

The following parts of this thesis are available for reading in the Internet: Table of Contents,

Preface, Introduction, Chapters 1, 2 and 3, as well as Works Consulted.

The other chapters are available in the printed form (together with the above mentioned) in

the BSCSCH library of UFGRS.

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Para minha linda Jaqueline.

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Agradecimentos

Ao meu grande amigo Vinícius Figueira, que muito me estimulou na idéia de fazer o

mestrado: devo a ele o empurrão inicial, bem como uma série de idéias e informações que me

encorajaram nos primeiros passos.

À CAPES, por financiar este projeto.

Ao professor Homero Vizeu Araújo, com quem tive grandes insights ao trabalharmos Antonio

Candido.

À professora Rita Terezinha Schmidt, que me facultou o acesso às manifestações

contemporâneas da teoria literária.

À professora Márcia Ivana de Lima e Silva, que possibilitou uma série de discussões

proveitosas em sua classe.

Ao professor Luís Augusto Fischer, em cujas aulas nós tanto refletimos sobre o fazer

artístico, e que tanto me ensinou sobre Machado – e o resultado é que eu acabei lendo

Shakespeare com olhos um tanto machadianos.

Ao professor Lawrence Flores Pereira, e mais uma vez aos professores Fischer e Márcia

Ivana, por aceitarem prontamente o convite para compor a banca e analisar esta

dissertação.

Ao meu amigo e colega José Carlos Marques Volcato, que me ajudou de forma fundamental

na minha pesquisa, me possibilitando o acesso a um precioso material bibliográfico

shakespeariano, e o principal de tudo: foi graças a ele que fiquei sabendo da questão das

versões Q e F de Rei Lear. Grande colega!

E, por fim, mas não menos importante, à minha orientadora, Sandra Sirangelo Maggio, que

com seu conhecimento da Literatura Inglesa teve um papel muito importante em situar

Shakespeare no contexto da literatura nacional na qual ele se insere e, com seu carinho e

dedicação, me acompanhou ao longo de todo este processo: chegamos!

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RESUMO

O objetivo desta dissertação é examinar os princípios composicionais empregados na

peça Rei Lear, de William Shakespeare, de modo a relacioná-los com as mudanças

observadas nos períodos elizabetano e jaimesco. Essas referem-se principalmente à longa

transição do feudalismo para o capitalismo, à subseqüente coexistência de ambos os modos de

produção na Inglaterra dos começos da era moderna, e, conseqüentemente, de representações

ideológicas tanto medievais como modernas. Uma tradicional tendência nos estudos literários

e históricos da Inglaterra é a de descrever tal coexistência como sendo pacífica e

evolucionária; contudo, estudos mais recentes apresentam tal período de transição como

sendo muito conflituoso. Creio que Rei Lear lida com esses conflitos não apenas através de

seu enredo, como principalmente por meio de sua estruturação. Para atingir o objetivo

proposto, utilizarei o procedimento da close reading para as duas cenas iniciais (I.1 e I.2), em

razão de estas apresentarem os principais elementos estruturais da peça. Em seguida,

apresentarei eventos históricos dos períodos Tudor e Stuart de maneira sucinta, os quais serão

relacionados com os artifícios estruturadores presentes em I.1 e I.2. O próximo passo será o

de examinar com menos detalhamento outras cenas relevantes, visando identificar nestas

aqueles aspectos estruturais analisados nos capítulos anteriores, bem como relacioná-los com

os conflitos na Inglaterra dos começos da era moderna. O último capítulo examinará a

composição social do público de Shakespeare, suas preferências dramáticas e literárias, e a

forma como Rei Lear lida com essas, com o propósito de estabelecer uma constante quebra de

expectativas em termos estéticos. A base teórica para esta dissertação serão os escritos de

Karl Marx, os quais considero relevantes para a elucidação de fatores sócio-econômicos nas

histórias inglesa e européia. Outros pensadores marxistas, tais como Brecht e Jameson,

auxiliarão a estabelecer a conexão desses com a organização estética proposta em Rei Lear.

Ocasionalmente aplicarei outras teorias literárias como complemento, tais como o continuum

formalista-estruturalista e a estética da recepção. Na conclusão, comentarei a cena final da

peça. Ao término do trabalho, espero validar a tese de que a organização estética

propositalmente instável de Rei Lear apresenta uma relação com a luta de classes na

Inglaterra dos primórdios da era moderna.

Palavras-chave: Literatura inglesa – Rei Lear – Shakespeare – Marxismo – Períodos

elizabetano e jaimesco

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ABSTRACT

This thesis aims at studying the compositional principles of William Shakespeare’s

play King Lear, in order to understand the way its structuring relates to the changes observed

in Elizabethan and Jacobean times. Such changes concern mainly the long transition from

feudalism to capitalism, the subsequent coexistence in early modern England of both modes

of production and, consequently, of both medieval and modern ideological representations.

Although a traditional tendency of the English literary and historical studies describes such

coexistence as peaceful and evolutionary, more recent studies depict those times of transition

as very conflictive. I believe King Lear deals with such conflicts not only by way of its plot,

but mainly in the manner it is structured. In order to pursue my goal, I will present a close

reading of the two initial scenes (I.1 and I.2) , for they present the main structural features of

the play. Subsequently, I will present a brief account of historical events in both Tudor and

Stuart times and connect those to the structuring devices presented in I.1 and I.2. I will then

examine some further relevant scenes in lesser detail, in order to identify the structural

features analysed in the previous chapters as well as their connection to the conflicts in early

modern England. The last chapter will examine the social composition of Shakespeare’s

audience, their dramatic and literary preferences, and the manner in which King Lear deals

with those in order to provide a constant break of expectations concerning its aesthetics. The

theoretical basis for this thesis will rely on the writings of Karl Marx, which I deem relevant

to elucidate socio-economic factors in the English and European history. Other Marxist

thinkers, such as Brecht and Jameson, will help me establish the connection with the aesthetic

organization proposed in King Lear. I will occasionally employ other literary theories as a

complementing tool, such as the formalist-structuralist continuum and the aesthetics of

reception. In the conclusion, I will comment on the play’s final scene. At the end of the work I

hope to validate the thesis proposed, being it that the intentionally unstable aesthetic

organization of King Lear relates to the developments of class struggle in early modern

England.

Key-words: English Literature – King Lear – Shakespeare – Marxism – Elizabethan and

Jacobean times

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE 10

INTRODUCTION 17

1 CONTEXTUALIZATIONS 32

1.1 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 32

1.2 A THEATRE FOR AUDITORY PLAYGOERS 38

1.3 THE SOURCES OF KING LEAR 39

1.4 THE Q AND F VERSIONS OF KING LEAR:

TECHNICAL INFORMATION 45

1.5 THE POST-SHAKESPEARE KING LEAR 51

2 THEORY 63

2.1 WHICH MARXISM? 63

2.2 WHICH HISTORY? 68

2.3 ENGAGED LABOUR vs. ALIENATED LABOUR: SHAKESPE ARE 70

2.4 IDEOLOGY IN CLASSICAL MARXISM 74

2.5 BRECHT’S V-EFFEKT: SMASHING IDEOLOGY INTO PIECES 79

2.6 OTHER THEORETICAL SOURCES 85

2.6.1 THE FORMALIST-STRUCTURALIST CONTINUUM 85

2.6.2 THE AESTHETICS OF RECEPTION 87

2.6.3 THE THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE CRITICISM 89

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3 I.1: A FORCE DISPELS 95

WORKS CONSULTED 138

The following chapters are available in printed form, but not in the Internet:

4 I.2: A FORCE ASCENDS

5 KING LEAR IS A TIME MACHINE

5.1 WAR: SCENE I.1 vs. SCENE I.2

5.2 FROM KING LEAR TO THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION 1640

5.3 FROM THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION 1640 TO KING LEAR

5.4 ANACHRONISMS IN KING LEAR:

DRAMA AS A TIME MACHINE

6 INSTABILITY AS A STRUCTURING PRINCIPLE

7 THE WAR OF THE THEATRES

CONCLUSION

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PREFACE

The following speech was delivered on the occasion of the defence of this thesis, on

October 30, 2006,

Dear Professors members of the examining panel, dear people of the audience:

writing a thesis is not really an easy task. The first, and possibly the main difficulty about it,

is choosing the object of study. When I entered the postgraduation program, I had already

decided to study Shakespeare, but my project then was about The Merchant of Venice, a play I

didn’t really feel enthusiastic about. On the other hand, the one play by Shakespeare that I

loved the most was King Lear, but I didn’t choose that one initially because I really felt

intimidated by the idea of working with it. To start with, my connection to King Lear was

purely emotional and sensitive. This means that I did not have initially any idea about the

sociohistorical circumstances concerning this work; more than that, its aesthetic organization

is so complex - a remarkable linguistic complexity as well as a plot full of events, which

seems to defy any logic. King Lear seemed absolutely ungraspable to me.

This made me really wary of working with King Lear. However, there came a

moment when I changed my mind and I thought it was worth daring. And so, I dropped my

original project in order to grapple with King Lear, the one play that I didn’t understand at

all, but which I loved even though. So this was already the month of May last year, and as I

said, I did not have the slightest idea how I would approach the play.

Up to that moment I had not read any criticism about it, and it also seemed impossible

to apply any sort of theoretical approach. Generally speaking, I favour the Marxist approach

for literary criticism, and I was then enthusiastic about adapting the notions developed by

Lukács in his essay ‘Narrate or Describe?’ for the drama criticism. Nevertheless, I was not

sure I could deal with King Lear that way, and so I decided to leave aside any theoretical

issues for a while in order to come back to them in a later moment.

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So, for some months, I dedicated myself to the task of reading the text as many times

as possible at the same time that I was reading assorted literary criticism about the play. And

there was a difficulty concerning these assorted commentaries about the play: such pieces of

criticism differed greatly from each other; more than that, they actually contradicted each

other, and, to make things worse, each of them seemed to be right in its evaluation about the

play, at least concerning some aspects of it.

And there came a moment when it seemed to me that such a divergence of viewpoints

about the same artistic work was possibly caused by the very structuring of King Lear: that

is, there is something in the formal organization of this play which causes us to have so many

and contradictory views about it. At that moment, I thought I finally had something to

investigate.

Now, if opinions and views about this play differ greatly, there is one thing about

which just all critics agree: King Lear is a work that breaks the expectations of the reader

and the spectator regarding all characters and situations featured in it.

The consequence of putting these two factors together is that I was lead to believing

that - strange as it seems -, the main feature of King Lear concerning its formal

organization is that it is structured around instability . Now, what do I mean by this? What

are the practical, concrete characteristics of this specific play that is structured around

instability? I would say there are three main effects concerning this.

The first one: this instability makes us change opinions about the characters and

situations presented in King Lear just all the time. We feel we are unable to keep any fixed

opinion about those.

The second one comes as a consequence: this play provides a variety of different and

conflictive perspectives, as is to be perceived from the critical fortune and the scenic history

of the play.

The third one: King Lear is characterized by a constant break of expectations - the

situations, the atmospheres and the characters themselves change constantly all along the

play, and in the most unpredictable way.

At that moment, I was not able to see yet how Marxism or any other theory could deal

with such aspects of the play, and, on the other hand, I felt that I really needed a theory to

work with. I had already read a number of Marxist thinkers, especially Brecht, but I could

not really see how they could explain the workings of the play. It seemed as if these were

completely different things that did not bear any connection. I started then reading for the

first time Marx himself, and there was a text of his in particular, called A Contribution to the

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Critique of Political Economy, which mentions the transformations in the early Modern Age

concerning the way the individual relates to his family and to society in general, as well as

the changes in the relation of the ruling classes in Europe, and especially in England, to the

accumulation of goods, to money, and to landed properties. And then it finally occurred to

me that King Lear was written precisely in such times of change, the beginning of capitalism

- times of tremendous changes and terrible uncertainties. It came to me that the structural

instability of King Lear was the aesthetic expression of the terror the Englishmen must have

felt in the times of the ascension of capitalism, a social order which, just like the play, is

unpredictable and structured around instability.

At last I was able to somehow relate the form of the play to the historical moment in

which it was written. However, this was still very general and very intuitive - I needed to

do a close reading of the play, but, technically speaking, I still did not know how to proceed

on a concrete analysis of the play at that moment. A little later on, I was reading Kent

Cartwright’s Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double, which deals with the manner the

Shakespearean tragedie regulates the response of the audience by means of a dynamics of

engagement and detachment. In the Introduction, Cartwright mentions a peculiar effect that

Shakespeare obtains in the composition of the character of Macbeth. This is what he says,

“Our early impressions of Macbeth, for example, contradict each other; witnesses from

battle report him as ferociously brave, while on entering he acts fearful and rapt.”1

Cartwright is not so much interested in contradictions as much as he is in establishing a

scenic coherence which has to do with what he perceives as the openness of the

Shakespearean tragic character. This does not really have to do with my understanding of

King Lear, but that passage of his book was an inspiration for me: people say about Macbeth

that he is ferocious and brave, and thus, we are prepared to see a character like this; yet,

when he first enters, he seems a rather fearful character. Our expectations about Macbeth,

based on what we have heard about him, are not met.

While Cartwright tries to somehow establish a coherence out of this, this passage

recalled the effect that so many passages in King Lear had on me, where I had contradictory

impressions about the characters and situations. I was not really aware of this in the previous

times I had read the play, but this brief comment on another play by the same author made it

clear to me that this happens many times in King Lear, also if I was not aware of this fact

while reading. The way Cartwright writes about the aforementioned contradiction in

Macbeth reminded me not only of things that I experienced while reading King Lear, but it

also recalled the V-effekt, a technique devised by the theatre director Bertolt Brecht which

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assembles contradictions side by side in order that the spectator has a critical perception of

the scene and, consequently, a keener political awareness of what life is in a capitalistic

society. The similarity that this formal construction in King Lear bears to Brecht’s V-effekt

showed a possibility of applying such notions to the analysis of the play.

This should be done very cautiously, though - Brecht’s technique has got a

socialistic orientation to it, while Shakespeare is an author famous, among other things, for

not having a clear political agenda. Also, the effects obtained by Brecht are very clear once

that you know what his working methodology is. Nevertheless, the contradictions in King

Lear did not work upon me in the same way as they do in a Brechtian play - I would say

that, instead of clearly perceiving such contradictions, I rather felt them in a sensitive way.

That is, it was an unconscious operation which, in spite of this, made me critical of the

characters in the play.

I finally had the key for proceeding a close reading of King Lear: I would look for

contradictions in somewhat Brechtian lines, but, at the same time, I had to be cautious

enough to perceive not only the similarities, but mainly the differences between Brecht’s

methodology and the compositional procedures employed for King Lear. Also, while a

Marxist approach seemed now very feasible, I decided that, while doing the close reading, I

would try to leave aside the Marxist theory and come back to it only later, when the play had

already been analyzed.

And so, I did this close reading in Portuguese for a good number of scenes, as well as

a more general study of other scenes, and this procedure covered all of the play, except for

the final scene, V.3. By doing this, I was able to perceive that King Lear is built around

certain formal principles which occur all along the play, such as:

a) Constant and sudden interruptions of subjects and situations by other ones;

b) Juxtaposition of actions and situations completely different from each other, with no real

gradation between them;

c) A wild mixture of dramatic and literary genres. Not only we have tragedie but, among

other things, we have got elements which are more proper to comedy, to the adventure

narrative and to the fairy-tale, among others. And, if this were not enough, King Lear is

characterized by this constant break of expectations concerning not only one genre, but

several genres. We can take the tragedie, the comedy, the adventure narrative, the fairy-tale,

and none of these genres behaves as it is expected to do.

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To sum up, we can say that, in King Lear, the author’s method of creating scene and

character is one which assembles behavioural and aesthetic contradictions side by side, and

thus calls our attention to them, instead of concealing them.

Many of these procedures are analogous to Brecht’s V-effekt, and might even have

inspired it. However, I identified two specific compositional procedures which make this

play very different from a Brechtian work, and which I have found only in King Lear. I

denominated those as the false continuity and the ‘not-too-conscious’ critical attitude.

Unfortunately, I will not be able to explain them right at this moment, both because they are

too complex, and because it would require some concrete examples from the play to present

them satisfactorily.

And, just as any reader, I always had a problem from the first time I read this play

with situating it along the timeline. It is always stated that the action of King Lear is situated

in a pre-Christian Britain, in 800 B.C. However, we have got characters, speeches and

situations that seem very much like the Middle Ages, and we have also got other characters,

speeches and situations that seem closer to Shakespeare’s times, that is, the Renaissance.

The consequence is that many critics and theatre directors refer to the setting of this play as

atemporal, but this was not a satisfactory answer for me, either.

While doing the close reading, I had the feeling that King Lear feels like a time

machine, it transports us to-and-fro through the centuries. I arrived to the conclusion that this

was necessary precisely to show the class conflict between the decaying feudal nobility and

the ascending bourgeoisie - that is, between the ruling class of the Middle Ages, and the

social class that would be the future ruling class from a certain moment of the Modern Age

on. This conflict presented different aspects along the centuries and it ended up changing

completely the organization of the state in England, and more than that, it changed the

English society itself in profound and irreversible ways.

What King Lear does in a way is synthesize a story that took centuries: the story of

the class struggle between the feudal nobility and the bourgeoisie. It is a symbolic

condensation of the history of England, and, because of this, Shakespeare needed to put side

by side elements from different historical ages, the famous anachronisms of the

Elizabethan/Jacobean theatre.

Such anachronisms present in Shakespeare’s plays are an aesthetic element that either

goes completely unnoticed by the post-Shakespeare readers, or then, it tends to be taken for

granted - that is, we have got a large number of critics who say that Shakespeare mixes

elements from different historical ages in his plays, but, more often than not, they do not

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dedicate any reflection as to why he and the other dramatists contemporary to him do this. I

actually believe that my main contribution in this thesis - the main novelty, let’s say - is

this study concerning the socio-aesthetic function of the anachronisms in King Lear: they are

the technical instrument that allows us to travel in this time machine.

I arrived to such conclusions without a previous good knowledge of the English

history. I had already read some books by English historians about the historical period in

which Shakespeare lived, but things had not gotten any clearer to me because the facts of the

Tudor and Stuart ages tend to be presented by traditional historiography in a very

disconnected way. What I had was the close reading of the play itself, some knowledge of

Marxist theory, and a knowledge of European history in general. I already knew that the

history of England differed from that of France in that, in England, there was a section of the

aristocracy which was more enthusiastic for capitalism and established an alliance with the

bourgeoisie, while in France the nobility was monolithically opposed to the bourgeoisie. I

also knew that there was a characteristic in the English history from Henry VIII up to Queen

Victoria of constant changes in the alliances between different social classes, and of these

with, or against, the government. And so, my analysis of the symbolic representation of class

struggle in the play was based very much on a generic European model and not on a

specifically English one. It was in this manner that I wrote Chapters 3 and 4, which analyze

scenes I.1 and I.2 respectively. I had previously decided that I should not read any more

books while writing the thesis but I always had two words pounding in the back of my mind:

Christopher Hill. This is the renowned Marxist English historian who wrote so many books

on the so-called Puritan Revolution. And, due to my familiarity with Marxist theory, I

believe that, when one studies History for the purpose of literary analysis, one should not

study only the period in which the analyzed fiction is set, or the times of the author, but also

what comes afterwards so as to put things in perspective. And so, in July this year, I started

examining the writings of Hill, and I perceived that I had just come across a source of rich

and invaluable historical information.

I saw that I had to stop writing for a couple of weeks in order to read these books

which featured a plethora of historical facts about the Tudor and Stuart ages which were

completely absent from the traditional historiography and, even better than that, they were

treated according to a Marxist perspective.

And my main source of joy in the discovery of the works of Christopher Hill was that,

strange as it may sound, they just confirmed my intuition and the findings I arrived to by

means of the close reading of the play. And I want to state this here and again: I did not

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arrive to an understanding of King Lear because I had previously studied he history of

England. No; it was just the opposite - I did not have a previous knowledge of the history

of England, but I arrived to it by means of a careful analysis of the structuring of the play.

What Hill provided me was precise historical data organized around a theory, but the main

arrangement of such facts could already be inferred from the dynamics of the structure of

King Lear. And, for this reason, I decided to present such data to the reader only in Chapter

5, after the analysis of some scenes - thus, the reader arrives to such facts exactly at the

same time that I arrived to them. It is the analysis of the structure of the play which allowed

me to understand the history of England, and not the opposite - and, if this was good for me,

I believed it would also be good for the reader. And this is why the historical facts come

after the literary analysis and not prior to it.

I also had the intuition that the several dramatic and literary genres in King Lear

represented the aesthetic tastes of the different social classes that went to the theatre in those

times, and that this probably had some relation to the stage of the class struggle in Jacobean

England. And so, after having read Hill and still while writing the thesis, I had other four

words pounding in the back of my mind - those were Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London.

This is the name of a book by Andrew Gurr which my good friend José Carlos Volcato had

lent to me, but which I had not read until then. Gurr is a historian of the Elizabethan theatre,

and I had already read two other works by him, and after this, I had decided that I could not

read anything else because there was no more time for it, even though I felt that Playgoing . .

should be the best book by Gurr. But afterwards, I finally read it. I was lucky enough to do

it after I had read Hill, and so these two sources of information matched each other perfectly

well.

So, I have just finished relating in brief lines my process of elaborating this thesis.

The last thing I would like to say is that, concerning Shakespeare studies (and maybe literary

studies in general), we have got a dissociation. In the last decades we have had a good

amount of leftwing essays which provide interesting information about the society of

Shakespeare’s times, but do not help us in understanding the artistic process in his plays -

that is, why Shakespeare is Shakespeare. I expect that, with this thesis, I might have helped

to bridge this gap.

ENDNOTES

(1) See Kent Cartwright’s Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double, p. 35.

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INTRODUCTION

King Lear: Dramatic Literature As A Time Machine is a study of the compositional

principles of Shakespeare’s King Lear. The analysis presented here relates the structuring

principles of this play to the main social conflict in early modern England - the struggle

between the ascending capitalist mode of production and the decaying feudal mode of

production.

This is a play which, along its four centuries of critical fortune, has motivated a wide

array of opinions about all imaginable aspects: its characters, its artistic value, its

philosophical and political standpoint, even its feasibility of being staged or not - and if we

come to think of the scenic history of the play along the twentieth century, with the different

perspectives provided by different theatre directors, we are going to add some more diverging

points of view about King Lear. In fact, I am a theatre director myself, and this is my

favourite play - and such a divergence of viewpoints upon the same artistic work has been

certainly puzzling for me, but more than that, it has always been very stimulating. It is

precisely the difficulty of offering an exhaustive interpretation and position about it that

shows us the vitality of King Lear. Moreover, by reading a considerable amount of the

critical fortune as well as appraisal about different stagings of this play along the twentieth

century, I could not help wondering that many of those seemed to offer consistent assessments

of King Lear, at the same time that they contradicted each other.

This peculiarity made me wonder that the reason for this must be found in the very

structuring of King Lear - and so, I decided to do a survey on the formal aspects of the play

in order to see if I could understand better this phenomenon. This was my starting point: I

never intended to arrive to “the definitive opinion” about this work, but I believed that such a

study would illuminate some aspects of how King Lear works on us - either spectators or

readers - and how it is able to go through centuries having both readers and spectators relate

to it in the most varied ways. (One could argue that what I am saying is true for just all

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classics of literature. I agree with this, but the vast number of contradictory views in the span

of four centuries is seldom obtained by other plays, or even by literary works in general.)

However, there is one single aspect of King Lear upon which all critics agree,

whatever their philosophical standpoint is, and whether they like the play or not: this is a

work that breaks the expectations of the spectator and the reader regarding all characters

featured in it. This also seemed to me an important matter of investigation: one thing is to

say, “The end of the play absolutely surprised me and shocked me” - we all agree about that;

we also agree that the play provides us a constant sensation of instability which makes us

change opinions all the time, and never know what is going to happen next. We can take this

for granted, or we can give up and attribute this to some wild inspirational factor that will

never be properly grasped by us. Another, quite different thing is to investigate how the

author manages to do this in technical terms. I concluded that such a break of expectations

was not only an important factor - it was the structural axis of the play, and it was worth

investigating.

Strange as it seems, my belief was that King Lear is structured around instability. On

the one hand, this instability makes us change opinions about the characters and situations all

the time, and provides a variety of different and conflictive perspectives, as is to be perceived

from the critical fortune and the scenic history of the play. On the other hand, it generates a

constant break of expectations. My focus, then, was set to the analysis of how Shakespeare

generates this instability and constant break of expectations in a technical manner.

However, I believe this cannot be done satisfactorily if one does not investigate the

social conditions and the historical movement that is connected to this specific work. If I am

to do a satisfying technical analysis on King Lear, this has necessarily to go pari passu with

the study of Shakespeare’s times and the specific sociohistorical conditions in which King

Lear was created. And there is one aspect about that moment of History which is

fundamental for this study: the coexistence in early modern England of concrete aspects of

life that belonged either to the Middle Ages or to the Renaissance, as well as the coexistence

of ideological representations which are proper to these two different historical periods. Such

a coexistence was a conflictive one: a clash was taking place between the long-existing

feudal mode of production and the arising capitalist mode of production - or, to put it in

simpler terms, that was a moment of bitter class struggle between the decaying feudal nobility

and the ascending bourgeoisie.

By studying Shakespeare’s historical moment, I also had to study the theatre of early

modern England, and an aspect that called my attention was that, contrary to the prevailing

19

image we have of the theatre of those times - the Elizabethan theatre as a venue where all

social classes in England gathered and shared their hopes, wishes and fears (i.e., the artistic

expression of an organic community) -, the theatrical tastes of that audience were also

divided along lines of class struggle, and that meant different varieties of drama, different

kinds of performances, and different theatre venues for conflicting social classes

(Shakespeare’s Globe was more like the exception that confirmed the rule).

Different social classes favoured different dramatic and literary genres, and here enters

the peculiarity of the Globe being a theatre venue that intended to appeal to all social classes.

Shakespeare was certainly familiar with all these genres, and I examined the possibility that

one of the formal factors that provides a break of expectations in King Lear is precisely a wild

mixture of assorted dramatic and even literary genres (among other technical factors, of

course). In other words, I thought it was profitable to consider King Lear a hybrid work

instead of a homogeneous tragedy. And the socio-historical aspect to consider was that such a

mixture of genres was an elaboration on a symbolic level of the class struggle in early modern

England.

In order to do a work like this, it was certainly profitable to get in touch with the latest

developments in literary criticism and theory, which examine literary works as inscribed in

the wider contexts of culture or language. And still, I have a very specific concern with

Shakespeare’s King Lear, which is examining it as a work of art. I completely agree with R.

A. Foakes when he states that “literature demands not merely to be understood, but to be

appreciated as an experience, and as art”.1 When he said that, he was specifically concerned

with recovering a sense of the artistry in works such as King Lear or Hamlet.

I will be dealing then with King Lear as art, not as culture or language. By this, I am

not denying the contexts of language and culture - these must be taken into account (and will

be). Also the manner in which we, readers, deal with literary works as an instance of

reception inscribed in specific historical and geographical contexts must be taken into account

- and, of course, whichever elements that constitute our identity. Taking these elements into

consideration was a conquest of the contemporary literary criticism, but we will not go very

far if we do not regard a work of art as a work of art, and an artist as an artist. If we deny or

circumvent the artistic experience, we will be denying Shakespeare (or any other author) his

agency, his own capability of having performed a transforming action in his own

circumstances of space and time. And this would be profoundly undialectic - besides the

pole of reception (readers and spectators), we must also consider the pole of production (the

author), if we want to have a global comprehension of the literary work that is being

20

examined. This does not mean that I will be using the words “art”, or “artist”, very often - in

fact, they will seldom appear, and I use the usual term “author” a lot more often. Still, the

word “art” will be present now and then, as something that includes literature - that is, where

common usage would prefer the term “literature and art”, I often say just “art”, for I

understand literature as a branch of the arts, and this is where my interest resides.

When I say “art” or “artist”, I am referring to somebody who, even if deceased four

centuries ago (in the case of Shakespeare), developed specific skills for his work and, more

than this, needed to make specific choices at every moment in order to shape King Lear in the

manner he did. Had Shakespeare made different choices, we would have another work (and

maybe we would not be interested about it). And I must take this as a dialogue - as a reader,

I produce meaning, but I do it within specific circumstances, and these include the

compositional choices the author made. In the specific case of Shakespeare, this is a dialogue

with a different historical age.

This dialogue will proceed in the following manner: I will examine scenes I.1 and I.2

by means of close reading; these two scenes present technical devices which will be present

in the rest of the play (even if in a transformed manner) - such technical devices provide the

structuring principles of King Lear. Afterwards, I will relate the structure of I.1 and I.2 to the

historical movement of the English society, from the Tudor era up to the event which came to

be usually called ‘the Puritan Revolution’. I will also examine a structuring factor in this play

which has been overlooked: the anachronisms. I will examine how the structuring principles

above mentioned operate in other scenes of the play (and this time it will not be a close

reading, but a brief examination). Finally, I am going to present information about the

theatrical (and also reading) preferences of the different social classes in Shakespeare’s

London, and relate such data to the historical information and the aesthetic survey which was

previously done.

Precisely because we will engage in a dialogue with another historical age, I need to

explain some terminology which I employ in this thesis concerning the dramatic genres of

Shakespeare’s times. In Chapter 1 (1.4) we will see in more detail the issue of the first

editions of Shakespeare’s plays - meanwhile, I will remind you that, until the eighteenth

century, these were published individually in a small format called Quarto, and, seven years

after Shakespeare’s death, they were all published together in a very large format called Folio.

In the specific case of King Lear, this play was named differently in each format, and I will

present these titles with their original spelling: the Quarto presented it as the True Chronicle

Historie of the life and death of King Lear and his three Daughters. With the unfortunate life

21

of Edgar, sonne and heire to the Earle of Gloster, and his sullen and assumed humor of Tom

of Bedlam. In the Folio, it was published as The Tragedie of King Lear. So, we have King

Lear characterized as belonging to two different dramatic genres of early modern England in

these two different formats: in the Folio, it is called a tragedie, and in the Quarto, a historie.

And here I must explain that you will come across this ancient spelling whenever I

refer to such genres in this thesis. I chose to write tragedie instead of “tragedy” in order to

historicize this Renaissance English genre. The reason for this is that the dramatic genre

known as ‘tragedy’ properly speaking was a form of art that came into being in Greece in the

fifth century B.C. Not only it had different formal characteristics from the Elizabethan

tragedie, but it was a manner of elaborating in a symbolic form conflicts proper to that

specific society. It was an art form developed in a very specific society, in very specific

circumstances of space and time, just in the same manner that the kabuki theatre originated in

a specific historical moment of Japan, and the kathakali theatre, in India. And, just as it

would not make sense to talk of an Argentinean or a Swedish kabuki, there is no such a thing

as an “English tragedy”. Also, the study of drama in general will not profit if we assign a

common denomination such as ‘tragedy’ to the works of dramatists who are so different from

each other, as Sophocles, Shakespeare and Racine. Nevertheless, we need some definition for

what constitutes an Elizabethan tragedie, and I think the Brazilian critic Bárbara Heliodora

provides a satisfying one: tragedies are plays whose protagonists belong to the aristocracy,

and, in the course of action, move from a state of happiness to one of unhappiness, until they

die in the end.2

As for the Elizabethan dramatic genre known as historie, it has got peculiarities which

make it different, for instance, from whatever sort of historical drama that was written in the

nineteenth or in the twentieth century. As Lena Cowen Orlin says, this was an “Elizabethan

invention, used with reference to a dramatic subject matter rather than a dramatic mode per

se”.3 She goes on to inform that prose writing about the history of England (in the form called

“chronicles”) constituted a popular reading which helped shape a national identity. This

appreciated subject matter was then transposed to the stage - the historie plays told the lives

of the kings of England, or of other historic figures and historic events. In the specific case of

Shakespeare, his histories presented to the audience examples of what were to be considered

good and bad monarchs. Generally speaking, one can say that the dramatic form of such

plays was fluid: it could resemble that of a tragedie, or emphasize the comic elements, or still,

and more often, alternate between, and present a mixture of both (and still other elements) -

22

of course, this mixture would vary according to the specific needs of the play, and the point

that it was trying to make about a specific event or figure in the history of England.

Both tragedie and historie present protagonists from the ruling class - in order to

make clearer the main differences between these two dramatic genres, I will quote from Linda

Woodbridge, who presents a list of relevant differences. Among other things, this is what she

says about the differences between the two genres, “. . . it is common to find in history plays

no clear-cut set of heroes and villains, but ambiguous collections of partly good, partly bad

characters drawn in shades of grey . . . history plays paint on a broader, less focused canvas

crowded with characters vying for attention; [while] tragedies focus on one or two prominent

central protagonists.”4

It is not my purpose in this thesis to discuss the historie plays. I reproduced the

passage above, however, due to some aspects that bear similarity to King Lear: in spite of

presenting two distinct groups which could be, roughly speaking, called ‘heroes and villains’,

we certainly can see ‘shades of grey’ in most of the characters. And a production of this play

would also have the stage “crowded with characters vying for attention”, differently from

other Shakespearean tragedies. This is to say that there are indeed elements in King Lear

which could cause it to be called a historie in Shakespeare’s times, even if I prefer its usual

designation as a tragedie. Also, there are other cases of plays by Shakespeare which were

given different generic identifications when published as a Quarto, or in the Folio.

The last thing I have to say about the manner I spell the dramatic genres Shakespeare

wrote, is that, whenever I refer to ‘comedy’, this will be spelled in the usual, contemporary

manner, otherwise from the other genres. This does not mean that I would get ahistorical

about it and disregard the differences in the manner that Aristophanes, Molière, Jerry Lewis

and Jerry Seinfeld provoke laughter. I think, however, that the situation here is very different

from the problem with ‘tragedy’, and it allows me doing so.

There is another aspect which I think is worth clarifying. Whenever I refer to a

specific passage in the play, I will do it according to the manner established in the English-

speaking countries. Since most readers of this thesis will possibly be Brazilian, I believe it is

worth explaining how this is done. Let us take as an example a speech of Lear which is in Act

2, scene 4, starting in line 118 and ending in line 126. Following the common usage, I will

refer first to the number of the act, then to the number of the scene, and finally, the lines - it

will look like this: II.4.118-26.

And here I must provide another explanation which has to do with the Quarto and

Folio editions of King Lear (which will be called Q and F from now on, following common

23

usage). There are many and important differences in the text featured in both, being the best-

known one the fact that Q features something like three hundred lines not present in F, and F,

for its turn, presents approximately a hundred lines not to be found in Q. And so, the vast

majority of editors and critics believed that the reason for this was that both Q and F were

imperfect transmissions of a complete original text that featured all lines present in both, and

which was lost. The solution for this: for approximately three centuries there has been an

editorial tradition of combining (or, as is usually said, ‘conflating’) the two texts into a single

one that presented all lines from both. As for the differences from one text to the other, each

editor would make his own decisions about the best solution to take regarding certain

problems (and, of course, there were solutions which became traditional and were commonly

adopted by most editors of the assorted King Lear editions).

Notwithstanding, there was a group of scholars who presented a different view about

this question in the early eighties. According to them, the traditional editorial solution of

conflating the Q and F texts into a single one was not a solution - instead, it generated

problems concerning the aesthetics and the comprehension of King Lear.5 These critics

understand that the pattern of changes from Q to F shows that each of these texts is

aesthetically coherent in itself, that they are in fact different versions of King Lear produced

in different moments, and, for this reason, they are not ‘imperfect’ - each of them was meant

to be like it was in the respective moment that it was written (or rewritten) - Gary Taylor

believes that Q was written around 1605-6 and F dates from 1609-10.6 More than that, these

structural differences from Q to F are so deep that they affect the action itself - and,

consequently, they affect content. Some of the most important differences: Q presents many

moralizing commentaries, which were excised in the F version; there are many cases in

which speeches are transferred from one character to another; the roles of Kent and Albany

are significantly diminished from Q to F, and the structural consequence is that this enhances

the role of Edgar.7

Although this thesis is not about the question of Q and F, I found it relevant to

mention the topic here. We will later see some properly editorial aspects of it in Chapter 1

(1.4) - because the working version for this thesis is F, and not a conflation.

I decided to use the F version instead of a conflation only after doing a long, detailed

and careful study of the Q version, the F version, and the conflated editions by G. K. Hunter

and Kenneth Muir. My choice was established after I did a thorough survey of Q and F

before reading the arguments of the ‘divisionist’ critics, because I did not want to be

previously influenced by those. After this long study, which included reading the divisionist

24

critics and comparing F to the conflated editions above mentioned, I was convinced that,

indeed, conflating Q and F was not the best solution concerning either aesthetics or content,

and that we will appreciate King Lear better if we take one of these two versions in separate.

And, in this, I also agree with the majority of the divisionists, who say that F is the version

that achieved the best artistic results. This is the reason why this thesis examines the F

version. The specific edition that was used for this study is King Lear: A Parallel Text

Edition, edited by René Weis and published by Longman. This edition presents both Q and F

versions side by side, in a very neat and didactic way that allows the reader to perceive easily

the differences between the two versions.8

Although I agree with the divisionist critics in many and important aspects, I do not go

to the point of considering Q and F as two different plays, as some of them seem to do - in

this, I agree with R. A. Foakes that Q and F are two versions of the same play to be read in

separate, but not two plays.9 (And Foakes also prefers the F version.) Also, this is no reason

for anybody to dismiss with the conflated edition he has got at home (and my conflated

Penguin King Lear, edited by G. K. Hunter, is one of those few objects that I treasure) -

reading King Lear as a conflation is still a wonderful experience. And I want to stress that

this thesis can also be followed by a reader who makes use of a conflated King Lear edition.

Now and then you will find endnotes that mention differences between Q and F

(especially in Chapter 3). This matter is not central for the purposes of this thesis, and this is

why it is in an endnote, and not in the main text. On the other hand, I agree with the

divisionists that, by blending Q and F, the conflations tend to blur some aspects which might

not be perceived or understood in a clear way - such cases of contradictions between Q and F

are the main reason for these endnotes.

From all these differences, there is one which I take to be the most important, and

which affects profoundly the political and philosophical outlook of the two versions: in Q,

the final speech is uttered by Albany; in F, this speech is Edgar’s (and this is how the

conflated editions present it in most of the cases). We have to take into consideration that,

when King Lear was first written and performed, England was ruled by James I, a Scottish

king who intended to join the two countries in the island of Britain - England and Scotland -

in one single kingdom (the third British country, Wales, was already part of England by that

time). Many characters in the play are not called by their proper names, but by the names of

the territories they control. I am saying this because Albany is an ancient name by which the

English would call the northern part of the British isle (including Scotland) - and thus,

Albany would be perceived by Shakespeare’s audience as representing Scotland. In the Q

25

version, it is not Edgar, but Albany, who utters the last speech. The effect, as Gary Taylor

says, would be that of presenting the Scot as the one with the last word, the one that unifies

the split kingdom. It would be easy to establish a connection between the Q Albany and King

James (as Gary Taylor says) - thus, James I would be perceived as a healthy unifying factor:

the anti-Lear.10

This happens in the Q version (and this is the version which was presented in King

James’ court in 1606). Now even if the factor above mentioned could please the then-king of

England, we should avoid a mechanicist thinking that would strive to attribute to this play a

fixed political label, such as “pro-government”, or “oppositionist”. I believe that a political

literary criticism can do better than ask if a literary work is ‘rightwing’ or ‘leftwing’. There

are many other factors, both aesthetic and social at the same time, which were probably not

noticed by James I, and that must be taken into consideration. It is these factors which I

consider fundamental for the impact that this work exerts on us.

We also have to take into account that this play underwent a profound revision later

on. In this revision, many lines were excised and, as a consequence, Albany, who was a

moralizer in Q (and also close to being a hero), became a collateral and more dubious

character. And, more important than this, it is not he who has the final say in F (and in the

conflations), but Edgar. And, by means of the analysis that will be proceeded in the following

chapters, we will see that this change bears a special significance, both political and

philosophical.

Since I mentioned Edgar, I would like to say that I will pay considerable attention to

this character in the last chapters of this thesis. The reason for this is that I believe the

structural weight that Edgar has in the play, has been overlooked, generally speaking. On the

other hand, I will not be dealing with the Fool - that is, I will have to talk about him

whenever he appears in a scene that is studied here, but the Fool himself will not be studied.

The main reason for this is that the Fool does not appear in scenes I.1 and I.2 - these are

precisely the two scenes that will be deeply and thoroughly examined, since they lay the

structural basis of King Lear (as I said, I will also talk about other scenes, but this will be in a

briefer manner). This means that a study of this character would be disconnected from the

other matters that will be examined here. The second reason is that I do not perceive the Fool

as a character properly speaking, but rather as a poetic function - he is not involved in the

dramatic action of the play, he does not have any function concerning the development of the

plot.

26

About the working methods employed in this thesis, I would like to explain four

things. The first one is about my choice of scenes to be examined, either by means of close

reading, or in a briefer manner - there is a tendency in the criticism of King Lear to focus

upon these scenes which bear a stronger emotional impact: the initial scene, the Dover Cliff

“leap” followed by the encounter of the blinded Gloucester with Lear dressed with wild

flowers, and the final scene. Of these, I will only examine the initial scene. The reason for

this is that I am examining the structure of the play instead of focusing on its mere effects.

However beautiful the Dover Cliff and the final scenes might be, they cause us an impact

because they are set within a specific structure. They would not be so powerful, emotionally

speaking, if they were not preceded by elements which lead us to appreciate them the way we

do; they would not mean much for somebody who read or saw these scenes on their own,

disconnected from a specific structural basis. Even if I chose to examine other scenes instead

of Dover Cliff and V.3, I believe that these last two ones might also be better understood if we

get to know about King Lear’s structuring principles as they operate in other moments of the

play.

The second relevant thing to clarify is that, although Chapter 1 is dedicated to

historical and critical contextualization, and Chapter 2 is dedicated to explaining the theory

that is used here, there is a large quantity of historical facts and theory that I purposely left out

of these initial chapters, and which I present along with the analysis of the play. In Chapter 2

I will provide a theoretical explanation for that, but I am going to provide now a practical

reason for doing this. As a writer, I am always careful of writing in a manner that I know I

would like to read (if I were in the reception pole). The acid test for me are two questions that

I always pose myself after writing a text: Can I easily understand what is written there? Is

this text boring or interesting for myself?

And one thing that displeases me very much as a reader, is being fed with tons of

information (whether historical, theoretical, or another) which I am not able to connect to

anything else. I believe that, in a work of literary criticism, the right moment to introduce

theory or historical information, is when the analysis of the corpus requires so, and not before.

If the information is presented in this exact moment, the reader will be interested in it, and

thus, understand it. Otherwise, it might be counterproductive. So, historical information and

theory will go intertwined with the literary analysis. I only left for the initial chapters

information which I could not see how to fit properly into the literary analysis of King Lear.

The third aspect regards how I introduce new information for the reader in the literary

analysis (basically, new ideas or new concepts). One manner of doing this is by starting from

27

perceptions and ideas that are commonly shared, and from this, proceed to new concepts. I

prefer to do otherwise, and not take anything for granted. That is, I prefer to suddenly

introduce a different perception, provoke a sensation of estrangement, and only after the

“shock”, explain how I arrived to that concept or perception. This second manner of

presenting new content is less common than the first one, but I believe that, in many cases, it

will be more effective.

The fourth thing to say is that, instead of doing a synchronic analysis of the first two

scenes (which would be more usual), I will work with scenes I.1 and I.2 by means of a

diachronic, sequential analysis. The main reason is that, due to our being separated by

centuries from Shakespeare’s circumstances, we possibly have lost some of the aesthetic

objectives Shakespeare might have had when composing King Lear. My approach will be

presenting excerpts from the text, and then analyzing the formal organization of the scene, so

as to highlight the manner in which social content is expressed there. This will be done step

by step - the further we go into the text, the more able we will be to make use of a theoretical

approach (in this case, Marxism and, in certain moments, its best variation to analyze

dramatic literature: Brecht’s concept of the V-effekt).

It is important to show the development of the situations and characters step by step

(and consequently, the ideological circumstances of Shakespeare’s aesthetic choices for this

work). Doing this was the manner that I found for not forcing my conclusions upon the

reader. Instead, I hope to make you understand my point of view by breathing along with the

play - that is, I believe the aesthetic movement of the play will lead the reader to the political

conclusions I arrived to. To sum up, we should better get the interpretive key from the

literary work itself, and not as some sort of a priori.

However, there is a peculiarity about the structuring of King Lear: this is a play in

which characters and situations interrupt each other constantly, generating thus completely

unexpected shifts. And so, King Lear is a play characterized by constant interruption; another

characteristic is that the elements of this interrupted situation or scene will come back in some

further moment, but in a very transformed way. And since I will proceed a diachronic

analysis, such interruptions will bear the following consequence: our analysis will be

interrupted in certain moments (especially in Chapter 3), and we will stop what we are doing

and start with the new event, so as to follow in an organic manner the shift provided by

Shakespeare.

There are two reasons for this, and the first one is that the drama is a sequential art

which is written not to be read, but to be watched on the stage. (It can be read afterwards,

28

when published, but this is not the circumstance of reception which the author was thinking of

when writing.) The original circumstances of reception of such a work are different, for

example, from the circumstances of reception of a novel. Whenever I am reading a novel, and

I am puzzled by a passage which I do not quite understand, I can always come back to it and

compare it to another passage (or keep in that page, and read it, say, three times). Not so with

the drama. If I did not understand what I have just seen performed on the stage, I cannot

come back - I will have to proceed along with the play, and maybe in a further moment I will

be able to connect what I see fifteen minutes later with that other moment.

It was for such circumstances that Shakespeare wrote King Lear. And I believe that, if

we are to understand some procedures of the author, it will not help us to explain a puzzling

passage by mentioning some further moment; this is not how it works in the theatre. Of

course we will try to obtain as many answers as that scene can provide us in that moment -

but not more than that. Whenever a puzzling interruption comes, we will stop, keep our

questions in mind, and try to obtain an answer in another moment.

The second reason for this procedure is an epistemological one. It is precisely these

“disagreeable” interruptions that will provide us knowledge. Whatever conclusions we arrive

to, they will not seem gratuitous and forced upon us - they will come “from the play itself”.

Understanding a specific literary work can also be a manner of understanding a certain

society, or a certain historical period, in a manner other than studying its empiric social facts.

And, of course, the most important thing about studying the way in which Shakespeare dealt

with the social conflicts of his times is not staying in early modern England, but trying to see

what insights it can give us when we compare that other society to our own, including not

only the similarities, but mainly, the differences.

Finally, I will inform you of the contents of this thesis. Chapter 1 explains the

historical terminology that will be applied in this work, and provides information about the

sources Shakespeare used for composing King Lear; some technical points about the editorial

tradition of conflating Q and F as well as about the point of view of the divisionist critics; and,

finally, some facts about the critical fortune of King Lear, as well as the developments of its

scenic history which I consider most relevant for our study (and also, some brief information

about the remarkable auditory quality of Shakespeare’s audience).

Chapter 2 will explain some of the theoretical principles employed in the making of

this thesis. It deals mainly with Marxism, which is the theoretical basis for this work, and it

also presents information about other theories and critical approaches which I employed as a

29

complementary tool: Brecht’s V-effekt, the formalist-structuralist continuum, the aesthetics of

reception, and performance criticism.

Chapter 3 analyzes scene I.1, and examines the way in which it relates to non-dramatic

narrative genres such as the fairy-tale and the adventure narrative; it also establishes a relation

of this play to the aesthetic principles of the German dramatist and theatre director Bertolt

Brecht. Chapter 4 analyzes scene I.2 and relates it to the structure of comedy; it also

introduces some structuring devices which Shakespeare devised specifically for King Lear.

As for Chapter 5, it compares I.1 to I.2 and, afterwards, it compares the structuring

principles present in both scenes to the historical movement in Tudor and Stuart England

which led to the Revolution of 1640. It also analyzes the structural role that a device from the

Elizabethan theatre - the anachronisms - plays in generating the aesthetic impact which

King Lear exerts on us, and also in allowing Shakespeare’s audience a critical perception

about its own historical moment.

Chapter 6 sums up the structuring principles that were introduced in Chapters 3 and 4

(the principles that bear analogy to Brecht’s theatre, but mainly, the ones that were especially

devised by Shakespeare for this play), and examines how these apply to other scenes of King

Lear. It also elaborates on the question of the mixture of genres in King Lear, especially the

manner in which this causes a break of expectations for the spectator and the reader.

Chapter 7 provides historical information about the theatre venues in early modern

London, the dramatic genres in Shakespeare’s times, and the manner in which the opposing

social classes in England related to the theatre, and to the dramatic and literary genres in

Shakespeare’s times. It connects such facts to the developments in the English history and, in

the end, a relation is established between this information and the notion of King Lear as a

play that presents in a symbolic manner the developments of class struggle in early modern

England, by means of incorporating into tragedie different genres that were favoured by the

opposing classes.

You must have noticed that I opted to start by the analysis of the play, and only

present the main historical facts in the later chapters 5 and 7. This is done for didactic

purposes, but there is also a theoretical basis for this procedure which will be explained in

Chapter 2 (2.1 and 2.2).

Finally, in the Conclusion, I will, of course, elaborate on the content of the previous

chapters, at the same time that I analyze some aspects of the final scene. I know that this is

not an orthodox procedure, but I believe it is an organic one. By breathing along with King

Lear, an unorthodox play, this thesis needed to present an unorthodox format. Thus, the

30

thesis finishes when the play finishes - and so, the conclusion needed to go together with

scene V.3.

I expect that, with this thesis, we get to be more able to understand the compositional

procedures that Shakespeare used in King Lear, by relating his aesthetic choices to the main

conflicts in his own society. I would also feel very glad if this work stimulates other students

from post-graduation courses to analyze literary works in a manner that combines delving into

the work’s structure to understand its aesthetics (that is, “breathing” along with it, and

knowing what makes a specific literary work different from other works), and try to

understand the society of the author, and its conflicts, by means of this artistic work.

ENDNOTES

(1) In R. A. Foakes’ Hamlet Versus Lear, p. 7. (2) See Bárbara Heliodora’s ‘Introdução a Macbeth’, p. 183, in the Brazilian 1995 Nova Fronteira edition of Hamlet and Macbeth. As with any generalization, one will find many exceptions among the Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedies, which differ from this definition to some degree - however, I still think this was the best explanation. Also, Bárbara Heliodora refers to “important protagonists”,and I changed this to “protagonists [who] belong to the aristocracy”, because this is actually what ‘important’ means in the text. (3) See Lena Cowen Orlin’s essay ‘Introduction [to Shakespearian Genres]’, p. 169, in Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide, edited by Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen Orlin. (4) In Linda Woodbridge’s essay ‘Tragedies’, p. 217, in Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide, edited by Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen Orlin. (5) On this matter, see the volume The Division of the Kingdoms, edited by Gary Taylor and Michael Warren. (6) The dates of the two versions are not a consensual matter among these critics, but Gary Taylor presents consistent evidence about Q dating from 1605-6, and F from 1609-10. For this reason, I go along with him in this matter. (See Gary Taylor’s essay ‘King Lear: The Date and Authorship of the Folio Version’ in The Division of the Kingdoms.) (7) On this specific matter, see Michael Warren’s essay ‘The Diminution of Kent’ in the volume The Division of the Kingdoms. (8) René Weis, the editor of the volume used for this study - King Lear: A Parallel Text Edition -, prefers the Q version, and he presents the cause for this in his ‘Introduction’. This offers an interesting counterpoint to the prevailing view (as in The Division of the Kingdoms) which favours F as a superior artistic achievement. (9) See R. A. Foakes’ Hamlet Versus Lear, pp. 96-7. (10) See Michael Warren’s essay ‘The Diminution of Kent’ as well as Gary Taylor’s essay ‘Monopolies, Show Trials, Disaster, and Invasion: King Lear and Censorship’, in The Division of the Kingdoms. Concerning the relation of the characters to historical questions of Britain, this is interesting information, “. . to [Shakespeare’s] audience, the names of the two Dukes [Albany and Cornwall] would have strongly suggested two British ‘kingdomes’ with which

31

they were thoroughly familiar. Albany, the old name for all of Britain north of the Humber, was eventually identified, more loosely, with Scotland; it was one of the three territories into which the legendary Brutus had divided the island. Cornwall was a separate kingdom until the tenth century; from the fourteenth century the Duke of Cornwall was also always the Prince of Wales, thereby uniting the two western territories under one nobleman. (This in turn would have immediately suggested that the ‘third, more opulent’ which Lear intended for Cordelia was England).” (In Gary Taylor and Michael Warren’s ‘Preface’, p. vi, I in The Division of the Kingdoms.) For some conjectures on the reasons for the last speech having been assigned to Albany in Q, see p. 451, endnote 162, in the above-mentioned essay by Taylor.

32

1 CONTEXTUALIZATIONS

In this chapter, I will provide some historical background which I think will be useful

when analyzing King Lear in the following chapters. As I explained in the Introduction, not

all historical data relevant for our study will be presented here: whenever I feel that some

specific historical information will be more useful and better understood if placed together

with the aesthetic analysis of the play, I will do so. Thus, what follows here is strictly

information that does not fit into the following chapters and, for this reason, is presented

aprioristically. We will start by some facts of the history of early modern England, especially

concerning the historical terminology employed along this thesis - and, by ‘historical

terminology’, I mean not only explicitly sociopolitical history, but also the history of the

theatre, either as drama or as performance. We will proceed then to brief and specific

information on the theatre of Shakespeare’s times – more specifically, its remarkably auditory

quality. From this, I will proceed to some information on the sources Shakespeare employed

for writing King Lear. After that, we will see some technical information concerning the

Quarto and Folio editions of King Lear. And, since this thesis studies the F version of the

play for the reasons presented in the Introduction, we will see briefly the centuries-long

tradition of conflating the two King Lear texts, and from there we will go to the questions

raised by the divisionist critics. Finally, we will see very briefly the reception of King Lear

from the Restoration on - I will focus mainly on the critical fortune, but I will also provide

information about moments in the scenic history of the play when I consider these relevant to

our study.

1.1 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

If we try to recall the historical information that we already have about England in the

Renaissance, all of us have the general notion that the theatre was an important, popular social

33

event in England in the last decades of the sixteenth century as well as in the first decades of

the seventeenth century, and that Shakespeare’s works were created in those times. We know

that, even if this author was primus inter pares, there were many other talented dramatists -

both the social importance of the theatrical event and the artistic quality of the drama written

then provide us a notion that the English theatre of those times was a vibrant one. We know

that, by then, England was ruled by absolutist monarchs, and we associate Shakespeare’s

artistic production to the most well-known of those, which is Elizabeth I - and the phrase that

comes up to our minds to sum up the data above is the Elizabethan theatre. However, many

of us know that a significant part of Shakespeare’s drama was written not in the times of

Elizabeth, the last monarch of the Tudor dynasty, but in those of James I, the Scottish king

who succeeded her in 1603, and who planted the seeds for what would be known, one century

later, as the United Kingdom - and who inaugurated the rule of the Stuart dynasty in

England. Fewer of us remember that James I died in 1625, and so the next Stuart monarch

was his son Charles I - but we all know that the first bourgeois revolution in Europe started

in England in 1640, that it lasted for twenty years and that, exactly amid the process, in 1649,

King Charles I was decapitated. We recall that this political movement displayed a strong

association with religion, and so, the long revolutionary period is usually known as the

Puritan Revolution. We are also aware that these pious men were not fond of the theatre, and

so, all theatre venues in England were closed in 1642, and by this deed an artistic era came to

an end. We have some general knowledge that the revolutionary process finished in 1660,

when the Stuarts were reempowered in the event known as the Restoration - and, finally, we

know that with the Stuarts also the theatre came back to England, but it did so in the manner

of a mediocre copy of the French theatre, and not as it was prior to the Revolution - the

drama of Shakespeare remained on page and on stage, but the theatre of his times was lost

forever, either in its social importance or in its specific scenic qualities.

When we think either of Shakespeare or of the theatre of his times, or still of the

history of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, those are the elements that first

come to the mind of most of us - some very general knowledge whose assorted elements are

somewhat difficult to interrelate in order to make up a comprehensible narrative. Especially

for somebody with no background in the history of England, the facts above mentioned might

give the impression of not being much more than a pile of disconnected information.

This is a problem for the literary critic who tries to understand the aesthetic

composition of a specific work by situating it historically: engaging in such a task requires

much more than assembling empirical data from the times the fictional work came into being;

34

it demands from the critic that he somehow relates the aesthetic organization provided by the

author of the fictional work to the conflicts of the society this author lived in. And in the

specific case of King Lear, this requires some knowledge not only of the times of James I

(when both its Q and F versions were composed), but also of the previous centuries. More

than that, in the specific case of King Lear it is important to know what happened in England

centuries after the play was first performed. This is not only because the story of Lear can be

associated to the real-life dethronement and beheading of Charles I four decades later, but

mainly because the play seems to bear a connection to certain tendencies in the life of the

English society which, even if not conspicuous in the times of James I, were already there to

be perceived by a keen observer such as Shakespeare was.

The biggest challenge when one intends to study such historical events is to associate

them in a manner that makes sense, and, as I said in the paragraph above, this is a rather

difficult task concerning the history of England. One factor which makes it difficult for a

foreigner to understand the English history is that its evolution is very peculiar. Like the other

European countries, it progressively left the feudal mode of production behind in order to

adopt the capitalistic one; also like so many European countries, England went through

absolutism during the Renaissance, and centuries later it adopted a form of government more

consonant to the paradigm of liberal democracy. But, as I just said, the English historical

process is very peculiar in spite of sharing important similarities with the continental

countries, and this might confound a foreign observer. And thinking especially of the manner

History is studied in Latin America, it is important to observe that, when we think of the

European historical processes which I have just mentioned, our tendency is to take the history

of France as an explanatory model. And the biggest difference of the English process to the

French one is that France had an aristocracy monolithically opposed to the bourgeoisie, while

in England there was a sort of split in the ranks of the nobility. There was indeed one part of

the English aristocracy which was as staunchly opposed to the bourgeoisie as their French

counterparts; on the other hand, there were significant parts of the English nobility which

were able to adopt the capitalistic ways and establish an alliance with the bourgeoisie. This is

the main difference of the English transition from feudalism to capitalism to the continental

ones, especially in France, and one has to keep this in mind to understand many events in the

history of that country.

There are two other factors which can make it difficult for a foreign observer to

understand the English history, and both have to do with the idiosyncrasies of what used to be

the dominant trend in the English historiography until quite recently. The first peculiarity of

35

the old English history books is that they tend to present the facts in a rather disconnected way

(somewhat like I did in the second paragraph of this chapter). Facts are effectively presented

in a sequential order, but it seems there is a lack of some element which could bind them

together. I do not have an explanation for this, but I tend to believe this has to do with the

famous English qualities of empiricism and pragmatism - a very healthy distrust of whatever

form of dogmatism as well as a wariness concerning aprioristical assumptions which cannot

be satisfactorily proved, have enabled that country to achieve progress in so many different

areas of life. Nevertheless, there are still areas of knowledge in which such an attitude

constitutes more of a drawback than of an advantage, and historical research is one of them.

By not presenting a clear theory which is able to tie the historical facts together at the same

time that it tries to make sense out of them, the traditional English historiography ended up

being instrumental for an ideology that strived to present the history of England as one of

ever-lasting social consensus, when in fact it presents episodes of brutal class struggle just

like the history of any other country. (On the other hand, the continental historiography is

built around a variety of theoretical models - whether it be positivist historiography, Marxist,

or another one yet - which allows a better understanding for the foreign observer.)

The other element in the traditional English historiography which makes the

comprehension of English history somewhat difficult for foreigners is the use of very peculiar

socio-historical terminology which applies only to England, instead of using another

terminology which has got better international currency. This goes hand in hand with the

above mentioned empiricism and the subsequent fragmentation of perception that it causes.1

The consequence is that, instead of using terminology which was widely accepted in Europe

(and consequently around the globe), both English historiography and literary criticism would

use designations which had no equivalent in other countries. For instance, the historical

periods were named after the English kings who ruled in those times and, as a consequence,

those labels were also used for the artistic production in the same period - thus, an English

author which would be labeled ‘Romantic’ in the continent was called ‘Victorian’ in England,

and the one which in the continent would be labeled ‘modernist’ was called ‘Edwardian’ in

Britain. This tendency is presently waning, and the terminology which is more employed

internationally is finding more and more currency in England. All this is to explain that, in

order to allow an easier comprehension of the facts which connect King Lear to situations of

class struggle in England, I will use the generalizing and widely-understood terminology of

‘aristocracy’ and ‘bourgeoisie’, and thus, I will not use the very specific English class

36

terminology of ‘gentlemen’, ‘gentry’, ‘yeomen’, or ‘citizenry’ (in fact, I will open an

exception and use the term ‘citizen’ in Chapter 7 in a way that is self-explanatory).

The consulted works of the English historian Christopher Hill were of great help in

allowing me to work in this manner. Being a Marxist, Hill fulfills several prerequisites which

I deem are important for this thesis: he makes use of a theory which connects the facts of the

English history in a way that is easily understandable, at the same time that it is not

subservient to the ideology of the ruling class. Especially in Chapter 5, but also in Chapter 7

for some extent, I will rely mainly on this bibliography to understand the facts in both Tudor

and Stuart times which bear a connection to the aesthetic structuring of King Lear. According

to Hill, such facts converge to the Revolution of 1640 - and here I must explain that I will

not deal with this revolution in detail, since it happened many decades after Shakespeare had

written King Lear, but I will be obliged to mention it because I agree with Hill that this is the

focal point for a more accurate perception of the historical facts presented.

And here I am going to call your attention to the fact that, when referring to this

revolution, Hill does not employ the widely current terminology of ‘Puritan Revolution’, but

instead, he calls it the ‘Revolution of 1640’, and I will follow him in this choice. Whenever

we attribute names to things, this shows both our perception of them and what we want them

to be. The expression ‘Puritan Revolution’ is not neutral: it came into being long after that

historical event, and it emphasizes the religious aspect in it to the detriment of the element of

class struggle. By saying this, I am not denying at all the Puritan predominance in that

revolution. It happens that I go along with Hill when he says that religion went along with

politics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and especially during the preceding years

of the Revolution (and during the Revolution itself, of course). That is, Christian religion was

a code understood by everybody in the English society, and so, divergent political currents

and ideas found a way of expression in the religious discourse. (In theoretical terms, Hill’s

option of not employing the phrase Puritan Revolution, but instead, the Revolution of 1640,

has got its roots in Marx’s views on this same historical phenomenon.)2

As I said in the Introduction, I will present in Chapter 7 some historical facts

concerning the theatre of Shakespeare’s times which bear relation to the situation of class

struggle and the transformation the English society was going through in those same times,

and my main source there will be the works of Andrew Gurr mentioned in Works Consulted.

Gurr himself is not a Marxist but his account of the social facts concerning the theatre of

Shakespeare’s times matches very well Hill’s presentation of the more general movement the

English society was going through. And so, I believe it is time to explain some historical

37

terminology which will be employed along this thesis, a terminology that is also used by the

literary criticism that studies Shakespeare.

Such terms - Elizabethan, Jacobean, Tudor, Stuart, Renaissance, early modern

England - frequently overlap each other, and it is the context in which they are employed

that determines the choice of one or the other. So, just as ‘Elizabethan’ refers to things that

happened during the rule of Elizabeth I, ‘Jacobean’ refers to things proper to the times of

James I. By rule of thumb, one generally associates the term ‘Elizabethan’ to some vibrant,

optimistic patriotism, while ‘Jacobean’ is associated to an atmosphere of decadence and

oppressive disenchantment. Of course the exam of historical facts presents much more

nuance than the widespread perception I have just mentioned, but it is important to be

acquainted with such perceptions since they have informed literary criticism for quite a long

time. The formal conventions of both drama and scenic performance kept just the same

during the two periods, but literary criticism attributes differences to the drama produced

under the two monarchs with reference to the subjects examined by the plays as well as to

their mood - and concerning this, again speaking in a general way, ‘Elizabethan drama’ was

associated to a cheerful patriotism, while ‘Jacobean drama’ would be one of a bitter, mordant

quality. (Again, there are the exceptions just as for any rule, but this is the association that the

phrases ‘Elizabethan drama’ and ‘Jacobean drama’ would usually bring to mind.)

Sometimes I will be using other terms, such as ‘Tudor’ and “Stuart’. I use the term

‘Tudor’ when I refer to something that was characteristic not only of Elizabeth, but of the

Tudor dynasty as a whole (especially Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth). Now, of

course, I will use the term ‘Stuart’ when I refer to something that was characteristic of the

subsequent dynasty, and not only of James I. And here I must make it clear that, when I use

the term ‘Stuart’, I am referring only to the absolutist monarchs that preceded the Revolution,

which are James I and his son Charles I. The Stuarts came back with the Restoration, but then

England was becoming more and more of a constitutional monarchy, and, just as the country

was never more to be the same as it was prior to the Revolution, the same thing happened

with the Stuarts.

Also, we have historical aspects concerning the society as a whole - as well as the

drama, the theatre venues and the theatrical performances -, which are common to the periods

of both Elizabeth I and James I (and sometimes these aspects extend even further in time). In

these cases the terminology I employ will vary according to the context: you will see that I

use very frequently the term ‘Elizabethan/Jacobean’; also, there are cases in which I deal

with facts which - although common to the times of both Elizabeth and James - always bear

38

the adjective ‘Elizabethan’, and I will follow this convention (for example, the open

amphitheatres of early modern England are usually called “the Elizabethan theatre”, and their

stages, “the Elizabethan stage” - even if they were equally used in the times of James I and

Charles I); there are other cases in which I use the more comprehensive term ‘Renaissance’;

and very often I will employ the phrase ‘early modern’ (as in ‘early modern England’, for

instance), since Shakespeare wrote in the beginnings of the Modern Age. Nevertheless, I

employ the phrase ‘early modern’ in a more restrictive manner than the usual: generally

speaking, ‘early modern’ includes the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while I

use it to refer to a shorter span of time - from 1510 to 1660, when aspects of the medieval

life were still very present in England.

Finally, there is the matter of the two types of theatre venues in early modern England,

which are the “public” and “private” theatres (this will be examined in Chapter 7). As

Andrew Gurr points out, traditional books on the history of the theatre kept (and keep) using

this terminology which dates from the Elizabethan/Jacobean times. The problem is that such

terms are not only inaccurate, but they also reflect the class prejudice of those times. Instead

of those, Gurr uses the terms “open amphitheatres” and “hall playhouses”, which I think are

more accurate and, for this reason, I will also employ those.

1.2 A THEATRE FOR AUDITORY PLAYGOERS

There are many good books which provide plenty of information about the theatre in

Shakespeare’s times, and so, there is no need that we see again these aspects. Nevertheless, I

want to call your attention to one single feature which bears a significant weight in my

analysis of the compositional procedures of King Lear, and this is the aural quality of both the

Elizabethan/Jacobean public and the theatrical performances devised for them.

We have to recall that, even if literacy had been making fast and steady progress in

early modern England - thus generating more and more avid readers -, this was still a

relatively new phenomenon. As a whole, the early modern Englishmen were firmly engaged

in auditory activities, which played a constant and very important part in their lives. Let us

keep in mind that, while reading is an individual activity, auditory activities have got an

intrinsic collective quality to them. These Englishmen were raised with rhymes; being

religious people, they went to the local church where they would listen to sermons; singing

was a frequent collective activity; when walking on the street, they would stop in order to

39

listen to preachers that would deliver long sermons. That is, they were people who were used

to listening for a long time, and for this reason they developed sophisticated auditory

strategies.

The theatre of the Elizabethan and Jacobean times, for its part, did not have the luxury

of visual resources which was to be achieved centuries later. This does not mean that the

theatre companies of those times were careless concerning elements of visual interest, but

those had very little weight in the whole of the performance and did not go much beyond the

physical action of the actors.3 What really counted and made a difference was the auditory

part - the audience of those times had a trained ear which was able to pick up immediately

the emotional effects provided by the rhythms of the speech; the narrative effect which

derived from the alternation between blank verse and prose; the double and triple meanings

which Shakespeare loved to provide to his words. Such playgoers were able to pick up

everything; more than that, they were eager to pick up everything; and, among all talented

dramatists of those times, it was Shakespeare who strived to take the best advantage he could

from the auditory capabilities of those audiences - for a talented dramatist will have his

writing capabilities enhanced to the best, if there is a talented audience to engage with him.

1.3 THE SOURCES OF KING LEAR

It was for such an audience that Shakespeare conceived King Lear. When writing his

plays, Shakespeare could make use of more than one source, and this is particularly true for

King Lear, where Shakespeare made use of at least nine different sources. Let us start by

saying that Shakespeare’s spelling of the name of the old monarch with an “a” (Lear) is

peculiar to him, for the name of the legendary king is spelled with an “i” (Leir) in all of the

author’s sources. For this reason, it will be ‘Leir’ whenever I write about the legend, and not

about the protagonist of the play.

For obtaining the elements of the story of Leir and his daughters, Shakespeare made

use of four sources. The first one, Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland

(written in prose, published circa 1577) was a very highly-esteemed history book in

Shakespeare’s times, and Shakespeare used it as a source for a large number of his plays (all

histories, plus King Lear, Macbeth and Cymbeline). It must be said that the boundaries

between fictional and historical narrative were not really clear-cut in those times: what

people really wanted was a good story, whether it really happened or not; and, if a fictional

40

story were considered edifying or suitable for any extranarrative purpose, it would be “real”

enough. (And, of course, history books were excellent for propaganda purposes - and so, for

instance, the Tudor propaganda demonized King Richard III, and the history books and

Shakespeare went along. Nevertheless, more recent research on the concrete facts about

Richard III tells us that, in fact, he was a really good king - but then, he was on the other

side.) Thus, history books would embellish the stories of the lives of really-existing kings

with events that never happened but were worth telling and reading, and they would present

alongside with real history also that which was pure legend, and this is the case of Leir -

there has never been any King Leir, but it was worth telling the story of this monarch who

would have lived around 800 B.C.

The second source for the story of Leir was John Higgins’ Mirror for Magistrates

(published circa 1559), written in verse, which provided stories concerning good and bad

examples from the lives of several rulers. The Mirror was a good example of a medieval

vestige in the Modern Age: all its narratives had to do with the medieval concept of the Wheel

of Fortune. According to a purely medieval view, the positioning of this Wheel concerning

one’s life would seal one’s fate, or provide him good fortune instead. Nevertheless, Higgins

did not write in the Middle Ages: in early modern England, the concept of the Wheel of

Fortune was adapted so that it would also comprehend the notion of an adequate moral

behaviour to it. This change allowed men to be more responsible for their own lives, even if

not in a contemporary sense - a proper moral conduct had a chance of avoiding a terrible

fate.

The third source was a more properly artistic one: Edmund Spenser’s renowned

romance The Faerie Queene (published circa 1590), whose several episodes - Leir’s

included - are written in verse. As for the fourth source, more than artistic, it is dramatic:

the play of anonymous authorship called The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir, and His

Three Daughters, Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordella, which might have been written in 1590 or

even earlier, and was published as a Quarto in 1605 (probably shortly before Shakespeare

started writing his Q version of King Lear). All these four sources feature or at least mention,

besides Leir and Cordelia, Goneril, Regan, Albany, Cornwall and the King of France.4 (Just

like Leir, the three daughters have their names spelled otherwise. As for the feudal lords of

the territories named Albany and Cornwall, their names change according to the designation

that the authors of each version assign to the respective territories they control). To these

characters, The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir adds Perillus, which is structurally

equivalent to King Lear’s Kent.

41

In all these four versions, King Leir informs his plans of dividing the country in three

parts, and sets a “contest of filial love” for his three daughters, in order to see which one gets

the best part; Cordelia, for noble reasons, does not accept to flatter her father; Leir then

divides the country in two parts that are to be governed by Goneril and Regan, and her

respective husbands; Cordelia is sent to exile, to live with her now-husband King of France;

Leir, by losing his powers, gets oppressed by Goneril and Regan; seeing no alternative, he

goes to France, where Cordelia listens to his grieves and soothes him (this is an aspect in

which the sources differ from Shakespeare’s play: there, Lear does not go to France – it is

Cordelia who goes to England, where she meets Lear and comforts him); the armies of

France, commanded by Cordelia, attack the forces of Goneril and Regan (in Holinshed’s

Chronicles, the King of France commands the armies together with Cordelia) .

As for the end of the story, all four sources go the same as well, but in this part,

Shakespeare’s play differs greatly from them, for they provide a happy ending: the armies of

France defeat the English forces; Leir is restored to the throne; Leir dies a good death after

having lived happily in his final years; Cordelia is now the Queen of England. The not-too-

happy part is that Cordelia dies an ugly death also in the legend, but this goes as an epilogue

that comes long after the whole story happened: sometime while she was ruling England, the

now-adult sons of the defeated Goneril and Regan dethroned Cordelia and put her to prison.

Depressed with this situation, she commits suicide and hangs herself in jail. (According to

Holinshed, this happened five years after Leir died.)

I would like to stress that, in all these narratives, Leir’s disgrace is that of being a

dethroned king and a father who suffers from filial ingratitude. In none of the narratives

above mentioned is there any mention to his becoming either a madman or a vagrant, both of

which are innovations by Shakespeare.

As for the subplot of Gloucester, Edmund and Edgar, Shakespeare took his inspiration

from a fifth source, and this was Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (written around 1580, and

published between 1590-93), a pastoral romance written in prose, which was a much-

esteemed reading in those times. Arcadia presents as one of its episodes the story of the king

of Paphlagonia who had two sons, Leonatus, who was legitimate and good-natured, and

Plexirtus, an illegitimate son who was evil, cunning and deceiving. The narrative starts with

two princes from the kingdom of Galacia, Pyrocles and Mucedorus, who seek cover from a

storm, and then they hear a conversation near there. They see that it is a blind aged man who

is being guided by his young son. The blind old man asks his son to leave him to die: he

wants to leap to death (exactly as Gloucester does in Shakespeare’s play), but the son,

42

Leonatus, does not want to leave him, and tries to convince him not to commit suicide. The

two princes who were listening to the conversation come to talk to father and son, and so they

listen to their stories about the reason for the present situation: Plexirtus, the bastard son, was

greedy and envious about his half-brother, and so he deceived his father, the king of

Paphlagonia, into sending Leonatus to death. The king ordered some servants of his to take

Leonatus to the forest and kill him, but the servants spared the life of the legitimate son and

let him go. Leonatus then became a “private soldier” for somebody else’s.

Because the king of Paphlagonia loved so much his illegitimate son Plexirtus, he

would do just everything for him, and that is exactly what he did: not only he did all favours

and punishments Plexirtus asked for, but he also distributed all offices and places of

importance to his sons’s favourites - and by so doing, he had left himself nothing but the

name of a King. He ended up being stripped of all power, and shortly after he was literally

thrown out of his seat by Plexirtus, who put out his father’s eyes. After that, Plexirtus opted

to let his father wander in misery, because the old man would suffer more like that than if he

were just killed. Plexirtus then became a tyrant - he murdered liberty by filling his country

of foreign soldiers and disarming his own countrymen so that nobody would stand for the ex-

king. Nobody dared show the ex-king the slightest charity, such as offering to guide him

around. In this, Leonatus came back and offered to be his fathers’ guide, for he had forgiven

everything due to the love he felt for the old man.

At this point the ex-king finishes telling his story to the two princes, and asks them to

help him leap to death, for this is the only thing in which Leonatus will oppose him. Right at

this moment arrives the now-king of Paphlagonia Plexirtus, followed by a party of forty

horsemen, only to murder his half-brother. Plexirtus, however, did not count with the

bravery, prowess and fighting skills of Leonatus, Mucedorus and Pyrocles, who, just the three

of them, kill an enormous number of Plexirtus’ men. Notwithstanding, the three fighting men

are still in danger. In this, comes to the help of the two good princes an army of a hundred

horsemen led by the king of the neighbouring country of Pontus. Meanwhile, another army of

fifty horsemen comes to the help of the evil Plexirtus. This last group is composed of men,

not just of great bravery, but who are very good-hearted; nevertheless, or even because of

this, all of these fifty newly-arrived fighters were deceived by the cunning Plexirtus.

In the end, the forces led by Leonatus, Mucedorus and Pyrocles win the battle. Justice

is made, and the ex-King of Paphlagonia makes Leonatus the new King. In the ceremony of

coronation of Leonatus, the old father himself sets the crown upon the legitimate son’s head,

and, “with many tears (both of joy and sorrow)”, sets forth “to the whole people his own fault

43

and his son’s virtue”. After kissing Leonatus, the ex-king dies, “his heart broken with

unkindness and affliction, stretched so far beyond his limits with the excess of comfort”. As

an epilogue, the now defeated Plexirtus devises a new trick in order to raise his now-bad

living standards: in a surprising move, he appears in front of his brother the King, “with a

rope about his neck, barefooted”, to offer himself to his half-brother’s judgment. What

Leonatus first sees is the murderer of his father, and he wants revenge. Plexirtus is cunning,

though. He does not justify what he does; instead, he bemoans and bemoans how evil and

lowly he is, and by doing this, he obtains precisely what he was looking for - his brother’s

pity; and then, his pardon; and finally, his favours. Life now smiles again for Plexirtus. As

for those men who, deceived by Plexirtus, fought for him, they are not so lucky: all of them

are tortured and die horrible deaths. 5

As it is proper to the romance literature, this narrative, which is full of events, is

presented in a detached manner. This means that we do not have emotional climaxes, and the

terrible epilogue is presented in a rather casual way. And, needless to say, the names are all

changed, but we have plenty of elements which are used in the subplot of Gloucester, Edgar

and Edmund: the father of a good-natured legitimate son and an evil and ever-intriguing

bastard, as well as the fooling of the old man by his own son; the blinding of the father who

gave everything (here, by his own son, while in King Lear, the illegitimate son is responsible,

but is not actively engaged in the torture of the father); the old man being conducted by his

good son and expressing his wish to die (and here the son is not in disguise, and, of course,

we do not have the grotesque situation of Shakespeare’s Dover Cliff scene); the father dying

of grief and joy at the same time.

From all the characters mentioned in the sources up to now, Plexirtus is the one who

more fully resembles the features of a character from Shakespeare’s play (in this case,

Edmund), instead of being just equivalent in structural terms, as all the other mentioned ones

are. I took much longer (and went to much more detail) to deal with this last source, because,

in my opinion, this is the one among all these five narratives which offers more elements that

seem to have been used in the shaping of the Bard’s play. Shakespeare extracted phrases and

sentences from all the sources he used in King Lear, but, concerning the narrative itself, I

have the impression that the Leir sources are rather poor in comparison to Sidney’s Arcadia.

And by this, I do not mean the profusion of events in this last one - I am actually speaking of

the motives of justice and pardon, which are just hinted in the Leir sources (with the exception

of the King Leir play, which develops the motive of pardon more fully than the other Leir

sources – even if in a stiff, awkward manner) but are more present in the story of the

44

Paphlagonian king. However, the profusion of events is also an element to be taken into

account, for it informs all of Shakespeare’s play, and not only the subplot of the “Gloucester

family” (as we can see in Chapters 3, 6 and 7).

Actually, even if Sidney’s Arcadia is the source for the “Gloucester family” subplot

concerning its main events, it is worth noticing that we have other elements in there which are

actually used, not in Gloucester’s subplot, but in Lear’s main plot. One of them is the above-

mentioned profusion of events, which is more proper to an adventure narrative in the manner

of the romances - it is the main plot of Lear that resembles an adventure narrative and is

crowded with characters, and not that of Edgar, Edmund and Gloucester which, in this sense,

is rather simple in comparison As for the misery and poverty the Paphlagonian king endures

after being stripped of his powers, Shakespeare’s representation of Lear is also more akin to

Sidney’s Arcadia than to the Leir narratives (again in this aspect, it is the King Leir play that

comes closer to Shakespeare’s work). Another aspect to notice is that Gloucester dies of joy

and grief, just as the Paphlagonian king, but this also happens to Lear - in this last case, this

is not just mentioned (as with Gloucester), but concretely represented in the dramatic action.

Up to here, I have mentioned elements in the narrative of the Paphlagonian king which

were transferred to Lear’s main plot. However, Shakespeare also performs the opposite

operation of borrowing an element from the Leir narratives to the subplot of the “Gloucester

family”: in scene XXIV of the King Leir play, Cordella and the Gallian King (i.e., the King

of France) go disguised as ‘country folk’ so as to see very closely how their subjects live. In

this, they come across Leir and Perillus. Leir does not recognize his daughter in disguise, and

so he tells the “country woman” what he did to Cordella and how he repents of having done

that. This scene is presented in a detached manner - more epic than properly dramatic, as

befits a chronicle historie -, for King Leir does not aim at generating any pathos (and even

Sidney’s narrative of the Paphlagonian king comes closer to doing that). In this detached

manner, we see not only Leir regretting what he did, but also Cordella in disguise saying in

apart, “Alack, that ever I should live to see / My noble father in this misery.” And these are

elements that Shakespeare borrows not for the Lear main plot, but for the Gloucester and

Edgar subplot.

I have mentioned before the profusion of characters and events which is present in

Lear’s main plot - this generates a specific atmosphere, and I would like you to keep this in

mind when we examine scene I.1 in Chapter 3, and also when we discuss the dramatic and

literary genres that formed the horizon of expectations of Shakespeare’s audience in Chapter

7.

45

I also want to stress an important structural choice of Shakespeare’s concerning his

use of Sidney as a source: the subplot of Gloucester, Edgar and Edmund gets its basic events

from Sidney’s Arcadia, but the “Gloucester family” is stripped of the royal status present in

the source’s equivalents, and this will have very important consequences, as we are going to

see in Chapters 4 and 5.

As for the other sources Shakespeare used for King Lear, there is also Samuel

Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures. Harsnett was the Anglican Bishop

of London around the time the Q version was written. His Declaration is an attack against the

practice of exorcism, and, in fact, the purpose of this pamphlet is more political than

theological: Harsnett aims at the Catholic Church, by associating Catholicism to ignorance

and superstition. Shakespeare borrowed from this text not for political-theological reasons,

but because of its colourful language. Wording based on the Declaration’s peculiarly

sounding phrases is used most especially in Poor Tom naming the devils, and in Lear’s

imprecations against women. Another source Shakespeare used for borrowing vocabulary is

Florio’s translation of Montaigne. The seven sources I have mentioned up to now are

examined by Kenneth Muir in his 2nd Arden edition of King Lear.6 In addition to these, G. K.

Hunter mentions two other sources in his 1972 New Penguin edition of the play, and these are

the Homily Against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion as well as the Gospel of St. Mark7,

both of which provide vocabulary and images for Gloucester’s apocalyptical speech in I.2.95-

108. (There will be more comment on the use of the Homily, in Chapter 4.)

I.4 THE Q AND F VERSIONS OF KING LEAR: TECHNICAL INFORMATION

After examining the sources, we will go now to another question concerning

Shakespeare on page, and that is more specifically some technical information about what is a

Quarto and what is a Folio edition. The English plays from the period 1574-1642 were not

written to be read, let alone to be published as books - such texts were aimed solely for the

purpose of theatrical performance. However, a good number of these plays would be

published individually in the format known as Quarto, which was a cheap one to acquire.

This does not mean that drama had literary prestige at that time, for it did not. In spite of this,

there were playgoers who were willing to acquire the text of a play they particularly enjoyed,

and so, it was common that the theatre venues in London offered such cheap editions of plays.

46

The costly Folio format was destined for publications of high prestige, i.e., considered

serious (the Bible on top of the list; history books such as Holinshed’s Chronicles, or works of

heraldry like Ralph Brooke’s Catalogue and Succession of Nobility followed). By contrasting

physically Quarto and Folio, one can have a more concrete idea. Folios were called like that

because the format would result from a sheet folded in half once. The size of the book

depended on the size of the initial sheet, but even with one folding, the resulting

volumes were very large books, from 11 to 16 inches tall, and from 8 to 11 inches in width.

The stationer who printed it would very often sell it just as a collection of loose sheets - i.e.,

unbound and with no cover - in order to make it a “cheaper” sale (even like that it would

cost around 15 shillings, which was a small fortune for that time). If the customer wanted to

buy it already bound, it could cost up to one pound. Customers would usually buy the Folios

as loose sheets and try to do a cheaper binding at some other place.8

This format was not for drama, which would be sold in the cheaper Quarto editions.

To make a Quarto, a sheet of paper would be folded twice, forming four leaves (and thus, its

name). They were usually 7 inches wide and 9 inches long, and were usually sold for

sixpence.9 Generally speaking, this would not affect the dramatists in London, for they took

their plays as mere entertainment. Those playwrights who wished to obtain literary prestige

would look for another vehicle - poetry -, and then try to get this published (and Shakespeare

was one of those). In 1616 (the year Shakespeare died), another London dramatist, Ben

Jonson - who was the most prestigious playwright of his times together with the Bard - did

the unthinkable: he published some plays of his, along with poems and masques, in the Folio

format. (And in this, one should add that Jonson was very talented at promoting himself, and

that he was the one and only dramatist of the period who had the project of acquiring literary

prestige with his plays, and leaving those for posterity.)

It is possible that the Jonson Folio inspired Shakespeare’s fellow actors in his

company, the King’s Men, to pay a tribute for the memory of their deceased colleague.

Whatever the motivation was, two actors from the King’s Men, John Heminges and Henry

Condell, undertook the task of editing the First Folio, which came to light in 1623, containing

all of Shakespeare’s plays but two.10

Some of the plays in the Folio were in print for the first time. Most of them, however,

had previous Quarto editions, and we can group these in three categories: plays that are just

the same in the Quarto and Folio editions; plays that present alterations which are not really

significant; and, finally, the plays that, according to Stanley Wells, present important

differences in the ‘good’ Quarto and Folio texts, and these are Hamlet, Othello, Troilus and

47

Cressida, and, most of them, King Lear.11 (According to T. W. Craik, ‘good’ Quartos were

published from a manuscript copy supplied by the author himself or by the company who

owned the text, and ‘bad’ Quartos were published from manuscript copies “compiled by some

process involving memorization of the text as performed in the playhouse”.12 Some of

Shakespeare’s plays were first published as a ‘bad’ Quarto before being published as a ‘good’

Quarto, being Hamlet the best known example of these. For the reason I mentioned, ‘bad’

Quartos are considered inaccurate versions, and so, they are not considered when editing a

play by Shakespeare.)

T. W. Craik says that the texts from which the ‘good Quartos’ were published were

either manuscript copies supplied by the author - and so, rough drafts of the text were called

‘foul papers’ -, or then, the source was what has been termed ‘promptbooks’. Laurie Maguire

defines those as “an annotated version of the author’s original manuscript (prepared by the

company’s scrivener and bookholder)”.13 Concerning the specific case of King Lear’s Quarto

edition, Gary Taylor believes that the characteristics of the King Lear 1608 Quarto make it

less likely that it was published from a promptbook, and so, he believes it was published from

the ‘foul papers’. As for the 1623 Folio edition of the play, Taylor believes that it comes from

the promptbook of a revised version of the play.14

As we saw in the Introduction, King Lear is a very specific case concerning the

variations of Q and F - its situation is very different from that of Hamlet or Othello. Here, it

is not only a matter of a big number of textual differences between Quarto and Folio (and

King Lear is the text which features the biggest number of differences of them all), and it goes

even beyond the aesthetic level - as the divisionist critics point out, such differences promote

important alterations in the structural weight of the characters; and consequently, in the action

itself. What we have here, then, are two authoritative texts - King Lear’s Quarto and Folio

versions must be seen as independent texts which have their artistic value for themselves, and

not as parts of a lost whole, which need to be completed - as they were perceived to be, up to

the mid-eighties.

There were no editing problems concerning the Q and F versions in the seventeenth

century, because in those times Shakespeare’s plays were only published in the Quarto and

Folio formats. Thus, a reader that bought a Quarto edition of King Lear would read one

version, while another one that bought Shakespeare’s Folio would read the other version.

Nevertheless, problems started in the eighteenth century, when the publishing houses and

editors started publishing the Bard’s plays in other formats: when publishing King Lear in a

new format, which version should be chosen for the new edition, the Quarto or the Folio?

48

This was no easy question for two reasons: the differences between the Q and F

versions of King Lear were enormous and posed difficult questions; and also, these editors

knew an awful lot about literature and books, but not about the reality and practices of the

theatre life. For instance, they could not fancy that a playwright wrote a play for his company

and, when they wanted to revive it five years later, he had second thoughts about it and

decided to change a lot of things. The consequence was that there was no such a thing as the

“true” King Lear out of two choices, because both versions had been indeed staged - and the

reality of the theatre is what is actually staged, and what the audience actually sees. And if

we come to think of a specific spectator who had watched a staging of King Lear by the

King’s Men around 1606, and who enjoyed it so much that he went to watch another staging

by the same company around 1610, he would actually have watched two different versions. If

he remembered somehow that there were important differences, he would prefer either the

first version he had watched, or the second one - both versions were authoritative; it would

be up to the spectator to decide if, by promoting so many changes, Shakespeare had improved

the play or made it worse.

As I said, the reality of the theatre was unknown to these eighteenth-century editors.

They could perceive that the writing style of the F version seemed an improvement over that

of Q, especially concerning the choice of vocabulary and the use of the blank verse: this

would lead them to believe that F was indeed the best version, the one that the author

approved of. However, F lacked something like three hundred lines which were to be found

only in Q. And when these editors came back to these lines in Q to see what the problem

could be, they could see no problem at all - the writing was indeed fine, it was actually

beautiful. They could not conceive that, what seemed beautiful for reading, would perhaps

not work so well on the stage, and that a man of the theatre (as Shakespeare was) has got no

qualms about eliminating those passages which, however pleasant for reading, constitute bad

spectacle when on stage; or that might constitute good spectacle if considered in separate, but

do not work on the whole - if such ‘good’ passages are kept, they will make the theatrical

performance of the whole play more dragging, more boring, or less comprehensible. They

could also see that Q, for its turn, lacked something like a hundred lines which were only to

be found in F.

Let alone the troubling question of speeches that were assigned to a certain character

in one version, and to another character in the other version. There were many cases like that

- and they thought somebody must have committed a mistake when printing one of the

versions. It did not occur to the editors that such changes could have happened due to

49

practical considerations concerning the acting capabilities of one actor of the company or the

other. What more, they could not fancy that maybe Shakespeare had changed his mind in the

space of four or five years concerning the artistic value of certain aesthetic choices; or that,

there could be political and philosophical considerations which made him change his mind

about certain parts of the play - that is, even if a certain change did not have important

aesthetic consequences, it could be very significant concerning the political and philosophical

outlook of the play (and the transfer of the last lines in the final scene from Albany to Edgar is

the most striking example - it certainly confers very different meanings to Q and F

respectively).

Also, such editors were removed at least one century from Shakespeare’s times, or 150

years, or even two centuries, depending on which editor we are talking about. This means

that they could have a general idea about what Jacobean England must have been like, but

they were not aware of important social and political peculiarities which, just like now, can

change very much within the space of four or five years. In 1605, James I had been ruling for

two years; in 1610, he had already been ruling for seven years. Significant changes can

happen in five years, either in governmental practices, or in the practice of censorship, or on

the outlook the people could have about the country – their hopes and fears. And so,

Shakespeare could indeed have changed his mind about certain aspects of the play within

such a space of time.

(As I said in the Introduction, the focus of this thesis is not on the difference between

Q and F; whenever I consider a certain aspect about such differences worth mentioning, I will

do it in the endnotes.15 )

In face of so many and important differences between the two texts, and unaware of

practical questions concerning the theatre, the eighteenth-century editors, generally speaking,

faced the following situation: due to stylistic considerations, they understood that the F

version was the best one. So the majority of them presumed that F would constitute a better

basis for a new edition. Nevertheless, F missed hundreds of lines of fine literary quality

present in Q. Also, there were a couple of moments when the choices in Q seemed artistically

better than the ones in F. That is, F seemed better in most aspects, but it still missed many

things present in Q which they thought were worth reading. What to do? The conclusion

most of them arrived to was that, even if F seemed the best version, both versions lacked good

things that were present in the other one; thus, both versions were “imperfect”: they must

have derived from a lost original which has been imperfectly transmitted in two different

manners. And since they did not have this ideal third, “perfect” version in front of them, they

50

believed that the ideal solution would be to conflate the Q and F versions into a single one

which would feature all existing lines in both. And whenever there were differences such as

stylistic ones, or speeches which were attributed to different characters, they would usually

opt for the F solution, but occasionally they could choose Q for a more specific matter.

The consequence: an editorial tradition started in the eighteenth century of conflating

Q and F, so as to obtain a “perfect whole”. From then on, editors strived to combine the two

versions in order to be as close as possible to the lost Ur-text they believed was the matrix of

both Q and F. This belief became so firmly established for the centuries to come that, with a

possible couple of exceptions, no one even thought of this question: it was taken for granted

that the conflated edition which was read at school, or which one bought in the bookshop, was

the King Lear.16

In the mid- and late seventies, however, different scholars in the United States and

England were doing research on the distinction of the Q and F texts, and all of them arrived to

the conclusion that both were independent and authoritative texts - and even though they did

not know of each other’s work at the time, their research pointed to the same direction. In

1983, this group of scholars published a collection of essays about the theme entitled ‘The

Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear’, which proved to be

groundbreaking. This collection, together with other important publications that were

happening at the same time about this theme (either by the same authors who took part in that

collection, or others), were responsible for changing the perception about King Lear’s

editorial tradition, bringing it under a critical light, at the same time that they promoted the

interest in reading the Q and F versions separately, for their own sake. In 1986, another very

important step in this direction was taken when the Oxford Shakespeare series, edited by

Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (one of the most important and authoritative Shakespeare

series), published King Lear’s Q and F versions in separate volumes, i.e., as independent

editions of different works. From then on, and as I said in the Introduction, the predominant

position among scholars and critics has been one of evaluating Q and F as independent

authoritative texts that must be read for their own sake (and in most cases, F is favoured as the

best of the two versions, although we also have critics and theatre directors who stand for the

superiority of Q).17 In spite of this having become a predominant position in Shakespearean

scholarship, I believe it will not be hegemonic as conflationism was for almost three

centuries, due to three reasons. The first one is that, in spite of what academia regards as the

best, it is unlikely that an editorial tradition that has lasted for three centuries (up to the

moment) will simply disappear; the second reason is that we still have scholars who defend

51

the cause of conflation, even if this is a minority position in the present days. Finally, the

logic inherent to divisionist criticism does not allow for a clear hegemony: if there is more

than one authoritative text for King Lear, one might prefer Q even if most in academia stand

for F; also, one could find reasons to defend that a certain conflation constitutes a third valid

variety of the text.

1.5 THE POST-SHAKESPEARE KING LEAR

After this brief information concerning the question of editing King Lear’s Q and F

versions separately or as a conflation, we can proceed in order to have some idea about the

“career” of King Lear after Shakespeare’s times. Following the Restoration in 1660, theatres

reopened in England, and they did so in lines that differed greatly from the theatre of

Shakespeare’s times. There were positive aspects in this change, for actresses were

introduced on stage (this was a new feature, since women’s roles were played by boys in the

pre-Revolution theatre), but, on the whole, such changes came for the worse. Scenic devices

were installed so as to illustrate visually the playwright’s ideas - and with this, the audience

was not required anymore to make use of its imagination in order to create together with the

actors ambiences which, in the Elizabethan theatre, were only verbally suggested (and due to

this development, the life of the Restoration dramatists was made easier in the creative sense,

and they did not have to strive so much in their playwriting as their forerunners did). Much

more important than this, this new theatre was destined only to a wealthy public. This was in

fact the final development of a tendency which had already been strong in the last years of the

pre-Revolution Stuarts (as Andrew Gurr points out and we are going to see in Chapter 7).18

As for the architecture of the new theatres, it resembled in nothing what was termed the

‘Elizabethan stage’: from the Restoration on, the theatre venues adopted the theatrical

architecture of Italy (which was the model of the theatres in France, where the future king

Charles II spent his exile years) with its proscenium arches that separated the audience from

the scene.19

Shakespeare’s plays were, thus, revived in new social and scenic conditions, which

meant that, also when the new companies kept true to the original texts, those stagings and the

reception they got from their respective audiences differed greatly from the pre-Revolution

times. Very often, the texts of Shakespeare suffered profound adaptations in order to suit the

52

aesthetic tastes of the Restoration audiences. King Lear is perhaps the most famous case of

those. There were even attempts to present it with no adaptations, but those did not succeed.

In 1681, however, the actor Nahum Tate wrote a famous heavy-handed adaptation that

made the play more suitable for the tastes of the new times. In doing this, he rewrote entire

scenes and promoted many profound alterations. Among those changes, we have Cordelia

and Edgar as a romantic pair, Lear killing the soldiers of Edmund who were trying to murder

Cordelia and thus saving her, Lear being restored to power and promptly handing it over to

Edgar and Cordelia, and the perspective of good old Lear living with the now-royal couple

Edgar and Cordelia happily ever after.20

This adaptation of Tate is very important in the history of the theatrical reception of

King Lear, for this was the King Lear that the English audiences saw in the theatre from 1681

up to 1838 (of course this was not the case on page – what the reading public was being

offered was Shakespeare’s text, even if in a conflated mode). The reason why Shakespeare’s

text was “restored” to the stage in the 1830s was possibly the fact that Romantic criticism

held this work in very high regard, esteeming it in a way that was not previously done.21

Generally speaking, the Romantic critics place King Lear as a grandiose, ungraspable,

sublime work. While such criticism is one of the most important developments in the critical

fortune of the play, one could also complain that it is too vague and too based on adjectives.

But then again, we must recall that, before the advent of the Russian formalism, literary

criticism was more impressionistic than technical. Of these critics (many of them outstanding

poets, such as Coleridge, Shelley and Keats), one that deserves special attention is Charles

Lamb, who wrote circa 1810 that “the Lear of Shakespeare [as opposed to Tate’s adaptation,

which he despised] cannot be acted”, and that it is “essentially impossible to be represented

on a stage”. According to him, this was a work to read, for “while we read it, we see not

Lear, but we are Lear”.22 Lamb was commenting the feeble results of the stagings of the Tate

version he had seen. The situation somewhat changed when the Romantics elevated the status

of King Lear and, as a consequence, the English companies started restaging Shakespeare’s

own text.

The later development of science and technology, however, allowed the stage

machinery to provide plenty of stage effects for the Victorian audiences, which enjoyed King

Lear very much as a thunderous melodrama full of horrors and which provided plenty of

opportunities for Romantic-style acting, full of “sweeping gestures, terrifying scenes, and

violent soliloquies, loudly delivered”, as Jan Kott so vividly puts it.23

53

In 1904, A.C. Bradley published his famous lectures on Shakespeare’s tragedies, and

his comments on King Lear are possibly the most famous piece of criticism about the play,

together with the later critique of Jan Kott.24 This is considered the apex of

Romantic/Victorian criticism about the play, and, as Foakes says, it synthesizes the main lines

of the nineteenth-century criticism.25 In spite of being a clearly Romantic critique, in which

he presents King Lear as an immense, stupefying work of art which is to be compared to the

Divine Comedy, to the statues in the Medici Chapel and to the greatest symphonies of

Beethoven,26 Bradley also presents some classical-minded restrictions, saying that the play

presents many failures in its dramatic structure, and he also poses realistic-minded

restrictions, by saying that many events in the play lack verisimilitude. According to Bradley,

what the play lacks in dramatic structuring and verisimilitude, it compensates in its poetic

qualities. In his very peculiar style, he says,

It is therefore Shakespeare’s greatest work, but it is not what Hazlitt called it, the best of his plays; and its comparative unpopularity [in relation to plays such as Hamlet or Othello] is due, not only to the extreme painfulness of the catastrophe, but in part to its dramatic defects . . . a failure which is natural because the appeal is made not so much to dramatic perception as to a rarer and more strictly poetic kind of imagination. For this reason, too, even the best attempts at exposition of King Lear are disappointing; they remind us of attempts to reduce to prose the impalpable spirit of The Tempest.27

I said “in his peculiar style”, because, at the same time that he talks of the play’s poetic

qualities, Bradley is somewhat repeating the same thing Lamb said one century earlier: King

Lear is wonderful, but absolutely impossible on stage (which is not exactly a high appraisal

for a play).

Bradley sees the play as a story of redemption, and by saying this, we can consider

that his lectures on King Lear are not only the climax of Romantic criticism, but also the

beginning of the second (in chronological order) important tendency of the critique of King

Lear, and this is the one that got to be called ‘Christian criticism’. The critics who are

considered to make part of this tendency see King Lear exactly as Bradley termed it, a ‘story

of redemption’ – and I must add that, when one says ‘Christian (or redemptionist) criticism’,

this covers a wide range of works which go from a more discrete philosophical standpoint

such as Bradley’s to essays which present somewhat more explicit religious views. (One of

the best-known pieces of criticism in this trend is Kenneth Muir’s ‘Introduction’ to the 2nd

Arden edition of King Lear.)

54

One thing that both Romantic and Christian criticism share is that they interpret the

play as one that deals with individual and essentialist themes. R. A. Foakes puts it very well

when he says, “Most of such accounts of the play treat it as one of cosmic scope, concerned

with universals, with Man abstracted from the petty concerns of ordinary life – as if the play

could only be understood by analogies with Christian or Greek myths . . .” 28

So, critics would usually see the play in redemptionist terms, or then, as a study of

parental relationship. Times changed very much, however, and the end of the fifties saw a

new perception of the world. This, of course, would affect the criticism of the play. Maynard

Mack, who is possibly the most talented of the ‘Christian critics’, was able to perceive that

King Lear now had to be viewed in a different way, and so he wrote in 1965,

After two world wars and Auschwitz, our sensibility is significantly more in touch than our grandparents’ was with the play’s jagged violence, its sadism, madness, and processional of deaths, its wild blends of levity and horror, selfishness and selflessness, and the anguish of its closing scene. We have not the Victorians’ difficulty, today, in discerning behind its foreground story of a family quarrel intimations of mortality on a far greater scale . . .29

The world changed very much, and the optimism as well as the sensation of stability

enjoyed by nineteenth-century bourgeois Europe was by then only a distant memory. This

changed political ambience provided that the criticism of King Lear suffered a radical change.

The most famous piece of criticism in this new mode was to come not from the English-

speaking countries, but from Poland. Professor Jan Kott of Warsaw had seen his country

destroyed by the Nazis; also, his country was the one of the Auschwitz and Treblinka death

camps. Professor Jan Kott wanted something different for Poland; he had even been a

member of the Polish Communist Party. The problem is, after the Communist Party came to

power, it also persecuted innocents. People would betray each other, allies became mortal

enemies overnight, and if someone knocked on your door in the middle of the night, you were

afraid: it could mean a death sentence. Professor Kott did not see the change he hoped for.

This ‘new’ Poland was a country of the unexpected: the prime-minister could be sent

to jail overnight, and at the same time somebody could be released from jail and become the

new prime-minister. Professor Kott taught Drama at the University, and he enjoyed very

much Shakespeare. By reading Shakespeare’s plays, and also by reading about the history of

early modern England, he got to the conclusion that the Bard was very familiar with a world

where a knock on the door in the middle of the night could mean death. He understood that

55

there were striking similarities between Shakespeare’s world and his own, and in the most

part not for the good. Kott developed a view of History as a nightmare, an ever-repeating

absurd. This is how he puts it,

We began our considerations with a metaphor of the grand staircase of history . . . There are no good and bad kings; there are only kings on different steps of the same stairs. The names of the kings may change, but it is always a Henry who pushed a Richard down, or the other way around. Shakespeare’s Histories are dramatis personae of the Grand Mechanism. But what is this Grand Mechanism which starts operating at the foot of the throne and to which the whole kingdom is subjected? A mechanism whose cog-wheels are both great lords and hired assassins; a mechanism which forces people to violence, cruelty and treason; which constantly claims new victims? A mechanism according to whose laws the road to power is at the same time the way to death? This Grand Mechanism is for Shakespeare the order of history, in which the King is God’s Anointed.30

Around 1960, Kott wrote an essay called ‘King Lear, or Endgame’, in which he

associates Shakespeare’s play to the works of Samuel Beckett. In his view, modern post-War

dramatists such as Dürrenmatt, Ionesco, but most especially Beckett, write plays built around

a poetics of the grotesque. These works, according to him, deal with the same basic questions

the Greek tragedy dealt with (human fate, the meaning of existence, freedom and

inevitability). This non-comic grotesque shares with the Greek tragedy the dramatic situation

in which the protagonist has to make a choice between two opposing values - and, still

according to Kott, both varieties of drama share in common the fact that this choice is

imposed on the protagonist; he finds himself in such a situation against his will. The

difference between the tragic and the grotesque is that, in the grotesque, “both alternatives of

the choice imposed are absurd, irrelevant or compromising . . . Every move is bad, but [the

hero] cannot throw down his cards. To throw down the cards would also be a bad move.”31

While tragedy is a game whose rules are established by the gods, the grotesque is the aesthetic

expression of the Grand Mechanism as formulated by Kott: an absurd, men-eating machine

which was not devised by the gods, but by men themselves. It is an inescapable mechanism,

even if created by fellow men, and the best the grotesque protagonist can do, is ridicule both

this Grand Mechanism and men’s tragicomic belief that the Mechanism might somehow be

fair and wise. No hope is left, only an unfunny clowning.

Kott sees King Lear as a play that shares with Beckett’s works this same view about

the human condition. And here it is important to state that his critique has got important

aesthetic implications. Kott says that the reason why so many productions of King Lear

56

failed, is that they relied on illusionist tricks which made the scene all the more ridiculous. In

order to achieve its proper aesthetic impact on stage, a staging of King Lear must be explicitly

theatrical, i.e., non-illusionist, in the manner of Beckett’s plays, and, of course, of the

Elizabethan/Jacobean theatre.32 Kott’s formulation of the grotesque acting on a stripped stage

for King Lear, as well as the theatre of Samuel Beckett, influenced the English theatre director

Peter Brook in his staging of King Lear in 1962, which is certainly the most famous staging of

the play (and is by far one of the most famous and influential stagings of any Shakespeare

play in the twentieth-century).

Early sixties. Exit Auschwitz and Hiroshima, enter Vietnam and the Cuban missile

crisis. King Lear started being perceived as a clearly political play. Peter Brook says that he

wanted to relate Lear more specifically to the rule of Stalin, but, in a more general way, he

also wanted the audience to establish a connection to all aging rulers who, in his belief, were

leading to world to a war. The violence and fear of such times increased the importance of

King Lear - R. A. Foakes says that due to the political and social climate of such times, King

Lear displaced Hamlet as the centre of the Shakespearean canon from 1960 on.33 Also the

tastes concerning the theatre were changing around those times. It is not that the light

entertainment theatre has stopped existing, but there was a growing demand for aesthetics that

provided either emotional shock or political awareness, or both at the same time - and many

dramatists, theatre directors and theatre groups were striving to do exactly that. This means

that Brook and Kott were not isolated - at the same time, other critics and directors in

England and the United States were exposing a perception of King Lear as a work of despair.

But it was Brook and Kott who were clearly the spearheads of what is considered the third (in

chronological order) important tendency in the criticism of King Lear: that which has been

termed the ‘absurdist (or existentialist) criticism’. To sum up, one can say that, also if there is

important criticism that does not fall into any of these categories, one can divide the

twentieth-century criticism of King Lear into two main groups: the Christian (or

redemptionist) criticism, which sees King Lear as a work about the ultimate redemption, and

the absurdist (or existentialist) criticism, which sees it as a work about the ultimate

senselessness and despair. We can also say that this last tendency has been the most well-

known and influential one in the last decades.34 (Being a theatre director, I believe that the

most efficient way to test the influence of drama criticism is by examining the degree and

durability of its influence upon theatrical productions. And, concerning this, one can recall

that, decades after Kott wrote his text on King Lear, England kept seeing productions that

strived to be the-one-effectively-Beckettian-King Lear-in-Kott’s-lines. Among the best-

57

known ones are the staging by David Hare, featuring Anthony Hopkins as Lear in 1986, and

Peter Hall’s staging in 1997.)

By identifying three successive main trends in the criticism of King Lear, it does not

mean that discussion about the play has stopped at the absurdist critics. Important criticism

keeps being written, but, as it is very characteristic of the last decades, there is no such a thing

as a clearly discernible current of criticism, a number of critics and artists which we can

clearly identify as a body that holds a certain perception of the play as something common to

all its members. The nearest that we have got to something like this are the divisionist critics,

which have been shortly discussed above - their situation, nevertheless, is clearly different

from the three previous cases. Those were aesthetic-philosophical tendencies in many cases

held by people who did not know each other, while the divisionist critics are more like a

group who, in most cases, collaborates and works together. The ‘divisionists’ have also got to

them two important aspects which make them different from the three mentioned tendencies:

on the one hand, they work upon a solid technical basis of textual analysis, while the

Romantics, the ‘redemptionists’ and the ‘absurdists’ are basically impressionistic critics;35

the other difference is that these three tendencies present a clear philosophical orientation,

while this is not the case with the ‘divisionists’ (this does not mean that they have not one, but

rather, that it is neither clearly discernible nor necessarily shared by all its members).

We still have important critics of King Lear who are either impressionistic or that do

not present a clear theoretical basis. Predominately, however, the critics in the last decades

examine the play under the light of a specific theory, whether it be feminism, Lacanian

psychoanalysis, deconstructionism, new historicism or cultural materialism (and it is

important to state that, concerning the last two theoretical tendencies, King Lear has been

discussed by critics who are among the main representatives of each of them: Stephen

Greenblatt for the new historicism, and Jonathan Dollimore for cultural materialism). As I

said above, we cannot find a properly unifying element in such theoretically-oriented

criticism, but there are main tendencies and concerns which can be perceived, however big

the differences in such works are. One of these frequent concerns is what Foakes calls “the

notion of ambivalence or absence of closure” in King Lear, an instability in our evaluations of

the play.36 Such criticism ranges from a perception that the play is so rich that it allows us to

reach different conclusions about it, to a notion of aporia in the manner of deconstructionist

criticism.

The other frequent concern is a rescue of the play’s historicity, so that the critic tries to

elaborate on the historical context in which King Lear was created, something which

58

consequently leads to an elaboration of the play’s content - and this historical context is the

decline of the feudal aristocracy and the ascension of the bourgeoisie.37 Such an elaboration

of the content of King Lear tries to establish its roots not only in the times of the critic, but

also - and perhaps mainly - in the times of the author. That is, instead of understanding

Shakespeare by making him our contemporary, as Kott does, we study the reasons why he is

not our contemporary (and, precisely because of the difference between his times and ours,

we might understand ours a little better).

A further development is what I would call, roughly speaking, a combination of the

two concerns above mentioned - rescuing the historicity of the transitional period in which

Shakespeare created his work, and the ambivalence of closure which prevents establishing a

coherent ‘meaning’ to the play. Such combination of these two concerns examines the

tensions in King Lear under the light of this text being a site of conflicting ideologies.38 As

with the other developments in the paragraphs above, Foakes points to the fact that such

critical works reach different conclusions.39 In fact, this thesis will be working along these

lines, with the specific characteristic of applying close reading as a working methodology, and

Marxism as its theoretical basis. Thus, we can proceed to the next chapter in order to clarify

some aspects concerning the theory applied.

ENDNOTES

(1) I believe this might also be a vestige of the nationalistic feeling of previous

ages when there was a concrete concern about not being invaded by the

Continent.

(2) Marx starts his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon by discussing the

need of the bourgeoisie of borrowing symbols and discourses from the past in

order to employ them for their own revolutions. He starts by mentioning the

French Revolution, “But unheroic though bourgeois society is, it nevertheless

needed heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war, and national wars to bring it into

being. And in the austere classical traditions of the Roman Republic the

bourgeois gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions,

that they needed to conceal from themselves the bourgeois-limited content of

their struggles and to keep their passion on the high plane of great historic

tragedy.” After that, Marx goes to the English bourgeois Revolution of 1640,

“Similarly, at another stage of development a century earlier, Cromwell and the

59

English people had borrowed from the Old Testament the speech, emotions,

and illusions for their bourgeois revolution. When the real goal had been

achieved and the bourgeois transformation of English society had been

accomplished, Locke supplanted Habakkuk.” (Quotations are from Karl Marx’s

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Chapter 1, available in the Internet; see

Works Consulted.)

(3) Alexander Leggatt writes on this matter, “Our knowledge of the visual taste of

the time suggests that it was not a bare stage in the sense of being austere

and undecorated, though we can only speculate about the nature and extent of

the decoration; but it was neutral in that it was the same stage not only for

every scene but for every production, occasionally augmented by scenic

elements (a bed, a tree, a throne) but making no statement in itself.” (See

Alexander Leggatt’s Shakespeare in Performance: King Lear, p. 5).

(4) Spenser, in The Faerie Queene, calls the King of France ‘Aganip of Celtica’.

However, this is the same King of France, and not some other character.

(Holinshed calls him Aganippus as well, but he lets it very clear from the

beginning that he is the monarch of France, so that a twenty-first century

reader does not get in doubt that he is writing about the same man

Shakespeare is.)

(5) Philip Sidney’s narrative about the king of Paphlagonia can be found in the

‘Appendices’, pp. 229-35, of the 2nd Arden edition of King Lear, edited by

Kenneth Muir.

(6) Besides Muir’s commentaries about these in the ‘Introduction’, the 2nd Arden

edition of King Lear reproduces these seven sources in the ‘Appendices’,

either in excerpts or in their entirety.

(7) See G. K. Hunter’s ‘Introduction’, pp. 39-40 in the 1972 New Penguin edition

of King Lear.

(8) The information in this paragraph was obtained from the combination of two

sources: Laurie Maguire’s essay ‘Shakespeare Published’, p. 585 (in

Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide, edited by Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen

Orlin), and the official site of the Royal Shakespeare Company (see

Works Consulted for it.)

(9) I am thankful to José Carlos Volcato for providing me information about the

measures of the Quarto and Folio formats.

(10) The two plays which were not included are Pericles and The Two Noble

Kinsmen (both of which were integrated into the Shakespearean canon later).

Of course, if one is to count Sir Thomas More, a collaborative work in which

60

he wrote three pages, or the lost Cardenio, or still Edward III, about which

strong evidence has been presented recently that Shakespeare had a hand in

its making, it will be five plays not included. (As for Edward III, there has been

discussion whether Shakespeare wrote only a few scenes or a significant part

of it. However, there has been growing academic acceptance that the Bard

took part in this collaborative work and, due to this, it is making its way into

the Shakespearean canon, having already been included in the Cambridge

and Riverside Shakespeare series).

(11) See Stanley Wells’ ‘Introduction’, p.2, in The Division of the Kingdoms.

(12) See T. W. Craik’s ‘Introduction’, pp. 20-1, to the 3rd Arden edition of King

Henry V.

(13) The most precious assets belonging to the Elizabethan/Jacobean theatre

companies were the costumes and, more than those, the texts which they

bought from the playwrights, and which constituted their stable repertoire -

and so, these should never be lost or stolen. (See Gabriel Egan’s essay

‘Theatre in London’, p. 21, in Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide.) Thus,

it was necessary for such companies to have bookholders for these

manuscript copies.

(14) The information in this paragraph was collected from: T. W. Craik’s

‘Introduction’, p. 20, to the 3rd Arden edition of Shakespeare’s King Henry V;

Laurie Maguire’s essay ‘Shakespeare Published’, p. 584 (in Shakespeare: An

Oxford Guide, edited by Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen Orlin); and Gary

Taylor’s essay ‘Monopolies, Show Trials, Disaster, and Invasion: King Lear

and Censorship’, pp. 105-6, in The Division of the Kingdoms.

(15) To those interested, such study is developed extensively in the volume The

Division of the Kingdoms, edited by Gary Taylor and Michael Warren.

(16) Actually, there was a couple of voices claiming for the independence of the Q

and F texts, but they were isolated. The most notable of them is Harley

Granville Barker, the English theatre director who revolutionized the staging of

Shakespeare in the first decades of the twentieth century. Not only he believed

that Q and F should be seen as two different texts, but he also claimed for the

superiority of the F version (this was in 1927). The critic E. A. J. Honigmann

also pointed to the direction of an independence of the two texts in 1965.

However, such movements did not bring any repercussion. (See Stanley

Wells’ ‘Introduction’, pp. 3, 14, in The Division of the Kingdoms. See also

R. A. Foakes Hamlet Versus Lear, p. 71-2.) To this, one could add the fact that,

when Peter Brook directed his staging of King Lear in 1962, some of the cuts

61

he did in the conflated text were precisely in the Q parts.

(17) In the present situation, besides the Oxford series publishing King Lear’s Q

and F versions in separate editions, we also have the case of the Cambridge

Shakespeare series, which, instead of publishing a conflated King Lear, has

opted for publishing the pure F version; also, the Pelican series has published

both Q and F versions in one single volume. Of course we have very

important series, such as the Arden and Penguin ones, which, even if referring

to the discoveries of the divisionist criticism, still opt for publishing a conflated

edition due to editorial tradition and to the expectation of the majority of the

reading public in this sense (and, of course, most Shakespeare series publish

conflations regardless of how they see the question of ‘divisionism’).

(18) See Andrew Gurr’s Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, pp. 182-8. See also

McGowan and Melnitz’s The Living Stage, p. 219.

(19) See MacGowan and Melnitz, pp. 219-20.

(20) See R. A. Foakes’ Hamlet Versus Lear, p. 45. For a very detailed list of those

changes, see Maynard Mack’s ‘Actors and Redactors’, pp. 56-8, in

Shakespeare: King Lear: Macmillan Casebook Series, edited by Frank

Kermode.

(21) According to R. A. Foakes, it was the Romantic critics “who first claimed for

the play the special status it now has” (in Hamlet Versus Lear, p. 45).

(22) It is worth reading Charles Lamb’s comments, which can be found in

Shakespeare: King Lear: Macmillan Casebook Series, edited by Frank

Kermode, pp. 44-5.

(23) See Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary, p. 101.

(24) Although I make use of several sources for my account of the critical fortune of

King Lear, R. A. Foakes’ Hamlet Versus Lear (especially Chapter 3) is the

main basis for it, since it provides a clear and concise organization of such

assorted information. This does not mean that I share all Foakes’ conclusions

concerning the matters presented, or that my own account is a paraphrase of

his work (there are differences in certain aspects of organization and

conclusions, although I follow his presentation in the main lines).

(25) See Foakes’ Hamlet Versus Lear, p. 49.

(26) See Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 244.

(27) Idem, p. 248.

(28) Foakes’ Hamlet Versus Lear, p. 50.

(29) See Maynard Mack’s ‘Actors and Redactors’, p. 67, in Shakespeare: King

Lear: Macmillan Casebook Series, edited by Frank Kermode.

62

(30) In Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary, pp. 31-2.

(31) Idem, p. 107.

(32) Kott says about this, “Producers have found it virtually impossible to cope with

the plot of King Lear. When realistically treated, Lear and Gloster were too

ridiculous to appear tragic heroes. If the exposition was treated as a fairy tale

or legend, the cruelty of Shakespeare’s text, too, became unreal. Yet the

cruelty of Lear was to the Elizabethans a contemporary reality, and has

remained real since. But it is a philosophical cruelty. Neither the romantic, nor

the naturalistic theatre was able to show that sort of cruelty; only the new

theatre can. In this new theatre there are no new characters, and the tragic

element has been superseded by the grotesque. The grotesque is more cruel

than tragedy.” (Ibid., pp. 102-3.)

(33) This is actually the main subject of Foakes’ Hamlet Versus Lear, but one

can see it in a very summarized way already in its page 1.

(34) G. K. Hunter writes about this, “The modern popularity of the play among

readers has its obvious counterpart in the theatrical movement which stresses

the theatre’s social role to shock and distress. If the later nineteenth century

stressed the pathetic side of the play and highlighted the healing role of

Cordelia, the twentieth century’s special contribution has been to stress the

inhumanity and impersonality of the processes which crush Lear.” (See G.K.

Hunter’s ‘Introduction’ to the 1972 New Penguin edition of King Lear, p. 52.)

(35) There are exceptions to the rule: for instance, redemptionist critics who apply

the methods of the New Criticism, such as Robert Heilman. However, most of

the criticism on King Lear up to the seventies was not theoretically or

methodically oriented.

(36) In Foakes’ Hamlet Versus Lear, pp. 63-5.

(37) Idem, pp. 65-7.

(38) Ibid, pp. 67-8.

(39) Ibid., p. 68.

63

2 THEORY

2.1 WHICH MARXISM?

By following a very usual division for the contents of a thesis along its different

chapters, I provided a historical and critical contextualization of King Lear in Chapter 1. So,

following the same usual division, this Chapter 2 is the one destined to explain the theoretical

basis for my work. Thus, somebody who is reading this chapter could expect that, among the

several theories (literary as well as other ones) which are in currency, I will pick from the

shelf the one theory that suits my work better, explain it thoroughly here in this chapter, and,

in the following ones, demonstrate the rightness of my theoretical choice by applying it to the

literary work I decided to examine. And so, all the further analysis of Shakespeare’s King

Lear will come as a consequence of both the historical facts in Chapter 1 as well as from the

theory explained here. In fact, I will meet some of these possible expectations, but this will

not really be the case with most of the other ones.

Let us start then by the one expectation to be thoroughly fulfilled: I will now say the

name of the theory which I apply in this thesis - and this theory is called Marxism. One can

then have the expectation of coming across with such terminology as ‘modes of production’,

‘the development of class struggle along History’, ‘ideology’, and other such familiar wording

- and this will indeed happen. The other expectation to be raised when I mention the word

‘Marxism’ is that I will first explain the socio-economic functioning of the English society in

Shakespeare’s times, and then I will present the aesthetic options of Shakespeare in King Lear

as a consequence of the first one.

In fact, this will not happen. It is true that there is a variety of Marxism which,

unfortunately, has been widely predominant along the twentieth century, and which splits the

life of men in society into two halves - one of which determines what happens in the other -,

and those are the infrastructure and the superstructure. The first one is the socio-economic

organization of a given society, and the second one includes all developments of society

64

which are not strictly economic: art, religion, philosophy, the legal system, political structures

and the State itself. When one thinks of Marxism, he will probably associate it to this kind of

dual thinking which, splitting the life of men into two halves, will have as a necessary

consequence the attribution of more importance to one of these two ‘halves of life’ to the

detriment of the other - and, as the terminology implies, this thinking believes that the really

important goings happen in the socio-economic sphere (i.e., the infrastructure), and the super-

structure is just an evidence, a cover for the concrete facts that determine it.

Such thinking is frequently to be found in Engels’ writings1, and it is characteristic of

the later Soviet-style Marxism. Such institutional Marxism caused terrible consequences in

the twentieth century - and even in countries that were not ruled according to such thinking,

it succeeded so well in obtaining the hegemony in Marxist thinking, that it came to be

perceived as ‘the Marxism’, even if there have been many other readings of Marx which just

do not go in this way. This has also had consequences in the area of literary criticism, with

certain critics examining literary works as a mere consequence and confirmation of the so-

called ‘socio-economic infrastructure’.

What happens is that such thinking is not present at all in the works of Marx, who has

even written, “The difficulty we are confronted with is not, however, that of understanding

how Greek art and epic poetry are associated with certain forms of social development. The

difficulty is that they still give us aesthetic pleasure . . .” 2

And Marx is right in that. Even prior to the establishment of Marxism as an

institutional philosophy, and also before the emergence of the first literary theory (which was

the Russian formalism), nineteenth-century literary criticism would frequently study literature

as a consequence of the concrete life in certain periods of History (of course, such empiric

criticism was not associated to a thinking of nefarious consequences such as Soviet-style

Marxism). Certainly, the difficulty in literary criticism is not in understanding that literary

works have to do with the society in which they were conceived, and their times - this is self-

evident. The difficulty is in understanding the effect that these literary works exert on us, and

this is all the more difficult when they are so detached in time as Shakespeare’s plays are.

Speaking about myself, I was troubled of how I could understand the workings of

King Lear, and relate this play to the conflicts of the times in which it was written, without

doing it in a mechanical way. And the truth is, we have got in Latin America a tradition of

lively Marxist thinking which points to this direction. When we come to think more

specifically of Brazil, we have, for instance, the works of Roberto Schwarz - and this is a

critic who, when studying the works of authors such as Machado de Assis, does not go into

65

the most obvious direction of understanding the aesthetic organization of such literature

merely as a “consequence of the infrastructure”. Instead, Schwarz understands such fictional

works as a manifestation of the reality, which is as valid as an object of study as the historical

facts which happened in the same times; a literary work is a manifestation in another level of

the social circumstances of its times. This fictional work is not subordinate to the empiric,

concrete social facts that happen previously or simultaneously to its making; it is actually in

the same level of these ones as a manner of understanding a given society. The consequence

is that, instead of doing the usual, which is first understand society in order to understand the

literary work in a later moment, one might just go the opposite way - by first understanding

the formal organization of a certain fictional work, one can have a better insight about the

circumstances of a given society than if he went directly to the History books. And the best

example of such Marxist criticism that comes to my mind is Antonio Candido’s essay

‘Dialética da Malandragem’, in which he first analyzes the aesthetic procedures employed by

the Brazilian author Manuel Antônio de Almeida in his novel Memórias de um Sargento de

Milícias, and in a second moment examines what information such formal procedures provide

about the Brazilian society in the early nineteenth century. This essay helped me set as a goal

that I would first try to understand the aesthetic procedures in King Lear, and from these

findings I would try to understand the English society of Shakespeare’s times.3

As of this, we have the notion that the school of thought which has been called ‘vulgar

Marxism’ divides matters into those which concern the socio-economic infrastructure (i.e.,

those which are deemed “really important” by this kind of Marxism) and the others which

concern the super-structure (that is, “all the rest” - including literature), and that this will not

benefit the study of literature. I also said that such a notion is not really present in Marx

(which is what many of us erroneously think).

We can translate the terms ‘infrastructure’ and ‘superstructure’ into more general

concepts, and so we can see more clearly the polarization between them. Instead of

‘infrastructure’ and ‘superstructure’, we could say, for instance, ‘matter’ and ‘ideas’, or

‘material’ and ‘ideal’. In fact, we have examples of schools of thought which are based upon

an opposition of these two poles as well as upon a belief that one of these must prevail, so that

we can have the truth. Following this reasoning, we could say that we have those who believe

that the truth, the comprehension of the facts of human life lies in the realm of ideas, and that

the ideas are the one factor which determines our lives - this school of thinking is called

‘idealism’; we also have those who think that the key for a comprehension of the human life

is in the concrete facts, it is the concrete matter that determines human life - and this second

66

school of thinking is called ‘materialism’. Both forms of thinking are based upon an

opposition between subject and object, in which one of these poles must prevail upon the

other. Whether one is a materialist or an idealist, he will view subjectivity and objectivity,

spirituality and materiality as poles of an epistemic relation of subordination in which one of

these must necessarily have the precedence over the other. We could then say that ‘vulgar

Marxism’ is clearly situated in the materialistic thinking: it believes that ideas are a

consequence of the concrete matter.

What Marx says about the opposition between materialism and idealism is quite

different, though. Let us hear a famous statement of his about this topic,

The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.4

By saying this, Marx means that a perception of reality that is based upon a

precedence of one of these two elements - matter and ideas - upon the other will be

necessarily warped. The building of knowledge is an active, practical task which requires the

presence of both factors - otherwise, it will not be possible. A perception that is based upon

the precedence of idea over matter, or vice-versa, is a distortion - it is a ‘false consciousness’

of reality, and it will not lead much farther. (Whenever I make use of the term ‘false

consciousness’ in this thesis, I do not mean the more widespread notion which connects this

term to the situation of the exploited classes who are not aware of their own needs due to the

phenomenon of ideology. Instead, I employ this term to refer to the distorted perception

which opposes idea to matter, or vice-versa.)

Such a distortion was widespread in the times of Marx, and it still is in ours. Man

develops an instrumental knowledge which enables him to achieve increasing control upon

nature, and yet, life seems to be getting worse in many aspects. A common perception in the

recent centuries (that is, the era of capitalism) is that the environment is completely alien to

us, at its best, and hostile, at its worst. We tend to feel that matter and idea, subjectivity and

objectivity, are opposed - indeed, we live in the age of ‘false consciousness’.

Either materialism or idealism will not be satisfactory; the answers they provide for

our questions are incomplete, for they are just symptoms of this ‘false consciousness’. Thus,

according to Marx, it is only the concrete action - which consists of an interaction between

idea and matter, or vice-versa - which creates actual knowledge. This joining of matter and

67

idea is not static, it must be in constant movement - man is the only species that, when

confronted with problems in his environment, tries to change it in a manner that suits better

his needs. Man is the one being that transforms his environment and, by doing this, he

transforms himself. This concrete action that unifies matter and idea into a transforming

whole has been given different names by Marx and the Marxists: action, labour, praxis - they

all refer to the same thing.

I said in the beginning of this chapter that a very common way of organizing a thesis

on Literature is starting it with a chapter that provides historical background about the times

of the author and the text, and then, in the next chapter, explain the theory which will be

employed, and only after that, analyze the literary work that constitutes the corpus of the

thesis. If I could, I would avoid completely such a procedure, for I agree when Marx

postulates that real knowledge is active, it is transforming, and thus, it unifies all the

constituent parts of knowledge into a single whole - the elements (both idea and material

circumstances) that existed before the transforming action, the result of the action, the action

itself in process, and the agent of the transformation, which ends up transformed himself.

This means that the historical circumstances of Shakespeare and of King Lear, the

theory I make use of, the analysis of King Lear, all go hand in hand - if I pick up and try to

isolate one of these elements from the others, I will see that it becomes meaningless; and

thus, none of these elements precedes in fact the other ones. Whatever attempt in terms of a

strict separation of these would be equivalent to the dissection of a living organism; it would

generate nothing but a ‘false consciousness’. If I explained all theory in Chapter 2 in an

attempt to dedicate the following chapters to sheer application of it, I would incur into the

practice of idealism: that is, I would attribute the Marxist theory (an idea) a generating

power, it would be the matrix of the subsequent analysis - and in fact, it cannot be so. I can

only discover things about King Lear and about Shakespeare by dealing with King Lear, and

not with Marx or the Marxists. Whatever theory that I apply will prove its worth only in the

concrete task of coming to grips with the literary work. More than that, it is not only the

theory that will put King Lear to the test; it is also King Lear that will test the given theory.

And a theory that does not resist King Lear (or any other text of choice) must be dismissed

with.

As a consequence of this thinking, I did my best to present the employed theory - not

only Marx himself, but also other Marxist thinkers such as Brecht and Fredric Jameson -

alongside with the literary analysis; I believe that a separation of these would be meaningless.

Nevertheless, there is some applied theory whose explanation does not fit organically the

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following chapters; it would slow down their pace in a considerable manner, and for this

reason I am presenting some of the theory in this chapter. The same applies to the historical

facts - if I put all of them in Chapter 1, it would be a manner of saying that such

“infrastructure” determines what goes in the chapters dedicated to the analysis. Most of such

historical facts will be presented together with the analysis - however, not all of them would

fit organically there, and so, these ones were presented in the previous chapter. In fact, I

arrived to the vast majority of such historical knowledge by means of careful analysis of the

play, and not the other way around. It was this almost-word-by-word close reading that gave

me plenty of insights concerning the possibility of certain sociohistorical facts, which were

later confirmed by the reading of the theory of Marx himself and, later on, of historiography

concerning early modern England.

2.2 WHICH HISTORY?

I started this chapter talking about the problematic notion of infrastructure and

superstructure, and now I am talking about History. History is a central element in Marxist

theory, but there is not something such as a single consensual perception about it, which

satisfies all Marxists. And thus, I would like to introduce now the one conception of History

that is employed in this thesis - this one is present in the works of Fredric Jameson, one of the

Marxist theorists I recur to in this work. In fact, the conception of History I am going to write

about is not Jameson’s, but actually Althusser’s - nevertheless, it is Jameson who adapted

this concept for the purpose of applying it to literary analysis.

Jameson employs the traditional terminology of ‘mode of production’, but he follows

Althusser in doing it in a manner different from the traditional: while we have a predominant

kind of Marxism that understands the phrase ‘mode of production’ as a synonym for the

socio-economic basis (the ‘infrastructure’) which causes all the rest to happen (including art

in general), Jameson employs it in a structural manner. According to this view, ‘mode of

production’ does not designate the so-called ‘underlying infrastructure’, but instead, it

designates a whole structure. The characteristics of this structure called ‘mode of production’

are to be perceived in its different branches: the cultural, the ideological, the juridical, the

political and the economic branch. None of these branches precedes the other: the cultural

branch is just as important for understanding a given society as the economic and the political

branches - all of them are a manner of ‘reading’ this society organized around a predominant

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mode of production. And so, this structure called ‘mode of production’ is a synchronic system

of social relations which are expressed in different “languages” or “texts” (the above-

mentioned branches).5 And by this way we arrive to a notion of History as an “absent cause”:

we cannot perceive History directly, we can only do it by means of the effects it exerts in the

different branches of the above-mentioned structure. Nevertheless, Jameson is careful to

explain that, when Althusser somewhat says that History cannot be perceived directly, and

thus, we can only have access to it by reading it as a text, he is not formulating a reasoning

that History is a fiction - he is not saying that History is a “non-existing referent”, as it could

be understood.

On the contrary: History does exist. History is the movement along time in which

different modes of production succeed each other by means of the dynamics of class struggle.

We cannot perceive or apprehend such a thing directly. This is impossible, not because

History is some pre-existing immaterial essence, for it is not. History includes both matter

and idea, since there cannot be transformation in human life without each of these elements.

We cannot apprehend History, not because it does not exist or because it is immaterial, but

because it is enormous.

History is impossible to be grasped by itself, and so, we need texts that can express it

in a narrative manner. These can be fictional texts produced in a given society, for instance;

or instead, we can have a non-fictional narrative about the succession of events in the

economy of a certain society in a given period; or still, we can have another non-fictional

narrative about the succession of laws in this same given society in the same period. All of

these are fine ways of trying to understand History by its remaining effects, and the fictional

narrative will be as important and concrete as the non-fictional ones: it is impossible for a

fiction to be outside of History. The author of this fictional work might not be concerned

about registering the historical moment, but he still will be part of that moment in History,

and this will be felt as a remaining effect in the fiction he produces - such a fiction could

only be generated in the circumstances of time and space in which it was conceived.

However, such narratives are formulated in very different “languages”. It is true that

Marxism is transdisciplinary from its birth, but there still is the need to establish a relation

between such different instances in order to have the possibility of adapting the discoveries

concerning one branch to the other one. We need a mediation between these different

“languages”, and so, I will present Jameson’s definition for mediation: mediation is a specific

code or language that is established with the purpose of analyzing at the same time two

completely different structural branches of reality - this code will be able to articulate two

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completely different kinds of objects, or “texts”. This does not mean that such different

branches of reality, or “texts”, will be unified into one and the same thing. This is just a

methodological procedure that allows a specific analysis - by means of this procedure, such

different levels of human life will establish a relation while at the same time they keep their

peculiarities, their different identities.6

Mediation is necessary in order to establish a connection between different areas of

life, and yet, according to Jameson, such a need is typical of the historical stage of late

capitalism. Our knowledge is split, not just between different theoretical areas, but mainly

between theory and practice, between idea and experience due to the above-mentioned

phenomenon of false consciousness. Such a contradiction can only be overcome in a practical

way, by means of the praxis which integrates idea, matter and activity with the purpose of

transforming a given situation. And this has to do with our discussion about History because,

all in all, according to Marx, philosophers will not be able to solve such a contradiction

between matter and idea if they stay outside of History and try to reach a better

comprehension just in a purely theoretical manner. It is only by taking an active part in

History that man can expect to achieve this feeling of wholeness.7

Now, of course, this does not mean that we are outside of History if we do not wish to

take an active part in it - this is something that just cannot happen. We will take part in

History also if in a passive way, but this does not seem to be a really good situation for self-

fulfillment. What connects us to History is action, praxis, or still, a third synonym for it:

labour.

2.3 ENGAGED LABOUR vs. ALIENATED LABOUR: SHAKESPEA RE

Labour. It seems such a common word, that one could think this cannot be the

solution for such a complicated epistemic conflict as the one we have been dealing with.

Nevertheless, labour is really the key for achieving an integrated perception that does not

separate the existence into subjectivity and objectivity, at the same time that it puts one in

connection with History. Let me make this clearer. Many of us might have a devalued

perception of labour, and yet, this should not be so. We admire the works of art of Rembrandt

and Michelangelo, we admire scientists like Einstein, Marie Curie or Alexander Fleming; we

admire educators such as Emília Ferreiro and Paulo Freire; and this list could go on for a long

time. We are talking of labour. Now one could argue that what we admire are the

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outstanding deeds and results of these people. I will say that this is not so: present-day

computers and machinery can do amazing things, and still, we do not admire them. But we

admire at least some of the people I have just mentioned. And we do it for one reason: those

were concrete men and women who faced certain concrete, historical circumstances, and all

of them had ideas which were not really easy to achieve. And yet, they strived, they worked

hard, they confronted at the same time the matter they dealt with and their own ideas. Things

were not easy for them, they had to adapt to certain situations, they had to drop some ideas

that seemed ineffective in order to try new ones. In the end, they achieved results - the

matter they dealt with was transformed in the end, their own ideas were transformed in the

end. These people also transformed themselves along the process, at the same time that they

transformed the world. This happened not because of luck, or of isolated ideas - it happened

because of their labour. We admire them because, by reading their stories of life or by

coming across the results of their work, we become aware of the things man and woman are

capable of doing to change their world for better.

One might argue that he indeed admires the labour of such people, but he does not

admire his own labour, nor his wife’s, nor his cousin’s, nor his neighbour’s - in fact, if one is

to look around, he might not find too many people whose work he admires. One might say

that some people are geniuses, or that they have an enormous sum of money to deal with, and

maybe these ones can do admirable things. And again, some of the people I mentioned in the

paragraph above might have had very favourable working conditions, but others did not.

Somehow we know that there is an element in the labour of these people that makes

their work different from that of most of us, but in most cases this is not sponsorship or a

good bank account. The big difference is that they were involved right from the beginning

with what they were doing, they wished to achieve certain objective results as well, and they

were ready to face the difficulties and frustrations inherent to their tasks. To sum up, they

were very engaged in their labour. And if we think a little more, we are going to see that it is

not only famous workers as the ones I mentioned above that might get our admiration. Let us

think of a more everyday situation: whenever we watch somebody who is involved with his

work - whether it is a carpenter, a mechanic, a nurse or a teacher - we derive pleasure from

seeing this person at work. This is because such people, for one reason or another, are

engaged in their labour - and, also if they will not become famous like the other ones, they

also change the world and change themselves in their everyday activities. When we see such

people working or when we think of the famous examples, we perceive that man is his labour.

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The human being is always in the making, and the popular saying that “life is what we make

of it” acquires a fresh meaning.

Nevertheless, this engaged work is an uncommon situation - unfortunately. The most

common for workers in general is being involved in alienated labour. This is an expression

that Marx coined, and it means a situation in which someone cannot establish an identity with

the activity he is performing or with the results of his work. Every worker - whether

working for himself or for someone else, whether he likes his work or not - puts literally

much of himself in his labour: the product that results from his labour is at the same time the

embodiment of his labour - if he has made a vase, the vase embodies the hours of work

necessary to generate it. Now we have to remember that, in a capitalist economy, the worker

will neither keep the vase he has made nor give it to someone he likes. The vase - the very

embodiment of his hours of labour - belongs to the capitalist. The object is separate from the

subject.

Moreover, the worker’s own labour is a commodity itself to be sold in the market.

This situation does not get so clear for the worker due to the high degree of abstraction in the

capitalistic economy - it is not just a couple of workers that go through this situation, but the

biggest part of society. In the end, our lives are determined in most situations not by workers

who know what they do, but by this alienated labour which was once part of ourselves, but is

not anymore. What is more, our own labour does not belong to us, and, by becoming an

object separate of us, it can in fact become our own enemy. We feel that the objects around

us have come alive and, on the other hand, we believe that we are helpless, incapable of doing

significant things. This is the root of the antithesis of subject and object - the epistemic

conflict we have been dealing with in the last paragraphs is a symptom of our times.

I do not mean at all that the exploitation of the labour of others is an invention of

capitalism. On the contrary, this has existed ever since human societies started dividing into

classes. What is proper to capitalism, though, is the high degree of abstraction that such a

situation has reached. In the times of feudalism, for instance, the tenant who was obliged to

give his produce to the landlord knew very well that the product of his work was being

transferred to the hands of someone else’s - such an exploitive relation was clearly

personified. In the times of capitalism, abstraction has progressively increased to such a level

in which the worker might not have the clear picture that he is being exploited, or who is

exploiting him - economic relations within the capitalistic society are not clearly personified,

but they are instead fetishized, not into the statues of figural idols, but into the numerical

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abstraction called money. And so, one has the sensation that the objects have come to life and

are suffocating him, when, in fact, objects are just objects with no will of their own.

In fact, there is a category of workers who usually does not experience this epistemic

conflict - I am thinking of the artists. Ideas, working material, the process of work: all these

elements are indissoluble parts of a work that is an outstanding example of engaged labour.

Artists do what they do because they have to; when they are at work, they feel they are

working for themselves, and there is nothing more important in the world than their labour.

Artists usually endure difficult material conditions, they might even starve - but they will not

stop working. And this is the reason for the admiration and envy that the artists cause in so

many people, also when their material difficulties are a well known fact: in a world of

alienated labour, these specific workers remind us that things can be different.

Think of Shakespeare for a while. Not everybody has read his works, but he is a

household word all around the world that stands as a synonym for excellence, and there are all

the time discussions about why, and how, and in which conditions he worked - this happens

with him more often than with anybody else (even Leonardo da Vinci). Fewer of us know

about the concrete working conditions of Shakespeare, but those of us who do, know that he

wrote his drama in a time when the theatre was an activity destined to big audiences - the

bigger the audience of the King’s Men, the more money they made. It is true that they would

also make Court presentations (and that certainly meant a gorgeous sum of money), but this

happened only a couple of times a year, and so, they still had the whole year to earn their

living. Thus, they needed big audiences. And yet, whenever Shakespeare wrote for the

public, he strived to provide his drama the highest artistic standard possible. This means that

he was in the double condition of writing to supply his material needs, and at the same time,

in order to achieve a high artistic quality, he did a lot of things that were completely

unnecessary for the purpose of earning his living. Nevertheless, it is precisely these

“unnecessary things” that make us admire his work.

Now and then there are discussions about “who really wrote the works of

Shakespeare”, because some people believe that such works could not have been written by a

man who needed to deliver a significant number of plays in order to put the bread on the table

- a nobleman with more spare time must have done it! Of course the plays were written by

him, but this is not the point - what I want to call your attention to, is to the fact that there is

always discussion about how such a common man, who faced the concrete circumstance,

already present in early capitalism, of having to sell a product in the market (his plays) in

order to make a living, could write such outstanding plays which provide characters known by

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almost everyone at the same time that they set the gold standard for writing in the English

literature. (And if it seems as if I am having a fit of Bardolatry, I am sorry, but what I said is

just true.)

We do not have such discussions about the ancient Greek artists, for instance, because

we know that the society they lived in was structured around a completely different mode of

production - we do not dedicate much thinking to the material circumstances in which such

artists produced their works, exactly because the concrete conditions of their lives seem so

remote to us. This is not the case with Shakespeare - the capitalism of his age was radically

different from ours, but even though, there are many areas of contact, and this allows us to

compare ourselves to him - that is, our working conditions to his - in a way that we would

not do with Aeschylus, for instance. Or, we could even think of dramatists who came later,

such as Racine. There is no such a discussion about him, and this is due to a social factor that

makes all the difference. The Elizabethan/Jacobean theatre companies were dependent on the

power of the State (which was controlled by the nobility) and whatever opportunity there was

of working directly for the Court was seen as a source of great profit; still, the main income

of such companies came from the market: they needed a great number of spectators who paid

tickets, and this was for the whole year. This was not the case with Racine - one might even

prefer his drama to Shakespeare’s, but we know that his was a courtly art, and so, his working

conditions were very different from the English dramatist’s. Racine worked in a later moment

of History as that of Shakespeare’s, but his concrete working conditions are more alien to us

than the Bard’s. And so, what we discuss is how Shakespeare could write his plays, or if it

was not someone else’s - but we do not do this with Aeschylus or Racine.

Much of our present fascination with Shakespeare owes to our perception that there

was a man who worked in circumstances which bear some similarity to our working

conditions - the circumstances of selling the product of one’s labour in the market - and still

achieving the results he did.

2.4 IDEOLOGY IN CLASSICAL MARXISM

Man is a being that symbolizes. Representation is an important capability that allows

our perception to raise from a concrete level to a more abstract one. The problem is that we

live in a historical situation where our labour - which is the core of our being - becomes

separate from us in such a manner that we do not even get aware of what is happening. And

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this is so because almost all the facts in our existence are mediated by money, and money is

an abstract representation of human labour. Nevertheless, we are not aware of this, and we

provide money (which, according to Marx, is nothing more than human labour represented in

numbers) an autonomy, a personality, and intentions of its own.

And so I will resort to the concept of ideology. This term can mean many different

things to thinkers of different philosophical orientations, but I will make use of the definition

of this word by classical Marxism. David Hawkes provides a good definition for ideology in

the lines I am working with, “Ideology consists in an inability to recognize the mediating

function of representation, in assuming that it is an autonomous sphere, and thus mistaking

the appearance for the thing-in-itself.” 8 This situation of taking representation as being

reality itself is not a development proper to capitalism - it is probably as old as man’s

capability of symbolizing and establishing representations.

We can also make use of the psychological notion that an individual tends to project

himself onto the world, and thus, see the world as a reflection of himself - if one does not

develop a deeper and wider awareness of reality, he tends to see the world as merely

reflecting his own needs and tendencies. For the purpose of elaborating on what ideology is,

we can transfer this notion to the collective sphere of the social classes. Somewhat in the

manner of individuals, social classes also tend to represent reality according to their own

needs and tendencies, that is, they project their worldview onto the world. They end up

believing that their perception of the world corresponds to reality. And, by seeing a

correspondence between their beliefs and “the world” (which is not the concrete world, but

the world as they represent it), the members of this social class understand that their

worldview is “universal”, “neutral”, “objective”, when in fact it is not more than the reflection

of their own class’s wishes and fears. When analyzing Marx’s classic study on ideology, The

Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Hawkes says that “the petty bourgeoisie has formed

a false concept of itself as a universal class”. 9 Let us see what else Hawkes has to say,

. . . when the particular is falsely subsumed within the general, representation is forced to assume a determining role which does not naturally belong to it . . . Because of this concept’s falsity [i.e., the petty bourgeoisie as a universal class], the normal relationship of representation to reality is distorted, and people can only see the representation, which they therefore mistake for reality. We find ourselves once more in Plato’s cave . . . Marx regards the delusion that representation is material and substantive as ideological. [Italics mine.] A representation is a product of the human brain, and humanity is under a constant temptation to idolize these representations, and treat them as though they were real.10

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As Hawkes reminds us, ideological representation is much more than a mere distorted

reflection of the world, for it generates very material consequences,

Although these ‘imaginary’ representations are not ‘real’, and in fact conceal ‘real’, material interests and motives [Italics mine], they nevertheless really exert a determining influence on the way people think and behave. This is an example of how representation can actively determine material conditions, rather than emerging out of them as a mere ‘reflection’. 11

We will not really understand the concept of ideology in classical Marxism, if we

think only in terms of an isolated social class. It is true that a social class will devise self-

justifying representations also in a situation where it does not have to convince the members

of any other social class. This is not the most important use of ideology, though. Let us recall

that a social class exists only because there are other classes in the same society. (Otherwise,

we would have a society with no division into classes. I know this sounds tautological, but

we cannot analyze a social class per se; we can only understand its doings by confronting it

with the other classes in the same society.)

However strong a ruling class is, it cannot exert control over the other classes only by

means of sheer force. It must convince the other ones that its manner of doing things is the

right one, and no other way is better than this one. This ruling class will do even better if it

convinces the others that its ways are the “only” ones, or, at least, the “natural” ones. In order

to do this, the beneficiaries of such ideology must act accordingly to such representations -

first of all, they must convince themselves of the “reality” of this representation, if they are to

convince the others.

Life in society is not determined by the gods, it is determined by concrete men,

especially the members of the ruling class. Nevertheless, they must make the others believe

that the organization in their society is “natural”. They must conceal from the other classes

the following fact: that things happen the way they do because the ruling class is to benefit

from such an order of things. As I said, the others must believe that such an organization

cannot be changed because it is “natural”. This is the main function of ideological

representation: to make the other classes ‘naturalize’ the perception of that which is not

natural at all.

Such representations will not convince the members of the other classes forever. We

might have factors of several orders - cultural, economic, political - that make life in a

given society change so much that a certain ideological representation, which was powerful

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some years ago because it was widely believed, ceases being believed, and thus, loses its

function of social control. I am going to give an example that will be easily understood by

Brazilian readers, and probably, by Latin American and Western ones in general. Let us think

of an ideological figure that has lasted for long millennia, since the establishment of the first

patriarchal societies. I am talking of equating father to God: according to such a

representation, God is like a father to all of us, and a father is a small god within his

household. Such an ideological figure is not typical of one single mode of production, but of

several (if we think of Engels’ scheme of the succession of modes of production along

History) - it certainly was not present in the ancient matriarchal societies, but we have seen

variations of it throughout History, until very recently. When political organization of society

required it so, the equation became something wider than only father-God; it became father-

God-chief-of-government: the king was both a father and a god to his subjects, God was the

King of all men, and, sure, the pater familias was a little king at home.

The father-God-chief-of-government is a figure that managed to survive the

establishment of capitalistic societies - until quite recently, this figure became even

expanded: boss-father-chief-of-government-God. Nevertheless, recent developments in the

Western societies in general, and in the Latin American ones in particular, have challenged

the survival of this figure. Changes in many aspects of societal life, mainly in the economy,

have demanded that women make part of the workforce in wider and wider numbers. This

does not mean a situation of equality - remnants of the ancient patriarchal society are strong:

women are paid lower wages, and are still submitted to social and familial situations of

submission men do not have to go through. Even though, if we think of the specific case of

the developed regions of Brazil, we cannot deny that women enjoy a different status as that of

forty years ago, and that, because of this, the figure of boss-father-chief-of-government-God

is shrinking and tends to disappear. And this is something very concrete: if a boss wants to

impose his ways, he will have to look for a way other than that of saying he is like a father to

his employees (which is something that would have been effective some years ago). This is

due to profound changes in society; we have possibly reached a point of no return concerning

the use of this ideological figure for purposes of persuasion and control, and I would not rule

out the possibility of it disappearing altogether in the Western societies in the future.

It is not only because of the change of the role of women that the ideological figure of

the father-God is disappearing. This has also got to do with the fact that capitalism is a mode

of production that heads to higher and higher abstraction. As we are going to see in Chapter

5, there is no such a thing in History as one mode of production substituting for the previous

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one at once. Both modes of production will coexist in a conflictive way for some time, until

one of them prevails. For this reason, capitalism had to coexist with feudalism for a long

time. In the times of feudalism, life was much more concrete, and so, ideological

representation needed to be more concrete, i.e., figural. Since the organization of life under

capitalism is getting ever more abstract, there is a tendency that, at least concerning certain

levels and needs, representation will also be increasingly more abstract. Such a degree of

abstraction does not leave much room for the figure of the father-God.

Let us connect this topic to King Lear and early modern England. We have to recall

that Shakespeare lived in a time of enormous changes, and this connects directly to the

question of the use of ideological representation for the purposes of the ruling class. The

ruling class of Shakespeare’s England was still the nobility, but, within the time span of a few

decades, this class would have to change ways and rule England together with the

bourgeoisie. Actually, within just half a century of the writing of the F version of King Lear,

England had changed completely. And that was just the beginning; after the revolutionary

process that started in 1640 and ended in 1660, the English bourgeoisie would increase both

its economic power and its political grip in more “evolutionary” ways. (I am saying this only

concerning institutional politics. If we think of the Industrial Revolution that came later on,

we must regard it as an even more radical revolution, also if it did not have direct institutional

effects.)

And the point is this: in Shakespeare’s times we had the coexistence of the feudal

mode of production and the capitalist mode of production. I believe this was a more radical

situation than the changes we are facing now. (I believe that, at this moment, we are facing a

big change in capitalism, and not yet, the beginning of a change of one mode of production

for another.)

We have to bear in mind that the feudal nobility had one representational system for

its ideology, while the bourgeoisie was still looking for one. Certainly, the ideological

representation of the feudal nobility was still hegemonic in Shakespeare’s times.

Nevertheless, the bourgeoisie was getting strong enough to start looking for new codes of

representation that would suit better its own purposes. While such representational codes

were not formed, the bourgeoisie could at least try to get hold of the then-existing codes for

its own purposes. In one level of life in society, this is very clear: religion. In such times,

when there was not a notion of a civil society organized around lay institutions such as

political parties, religion provided a common code by means of which the assorted social

groups could hope to articulate their wishes, hopes and fears. Different from the present

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Western societies, religion was not a matter of private concern - it was public matter. And

so, these different social groups would articulate their discourse in religious terminology, but

there was also a strong sociopolitical aspect to it.12 This is why Christopher Hill, when

referring to the future Revolution of 1640, does not adopt the more common terminology of

‘Puritan Revolution’. In those times, but also before, in Shakespeare’s times, religious

denominations also expressed the political concerns of specific social groups. All along the

sixteenth and seventeenth century, religious denominations would imply specific political

views, and this was so not only for the Puritans, but also for the Anglicans and the Catholics,

for instance.

This is easier to grasp in religion, but art, and more specifically the theatre, would also

constitute a field where ideological representations could be reinforced, tested or confronted.

It was in such a context that Shakespeare wrote King Lear.

2.5 BRECHT’S V-EFFEKT: SMASHING IDEOLOGY INTO PIECES

Since ideology is representation, and not concrete matter, it can (and will) also be

present in art. Nevertheless, as we have just seen, being ‘fictional’ does not mean that the

ideological constructs are harmless and exert no effects in the concrete life of the human

beings. As Hawkes says, such constructs, by influencing the thinking and behaviour of

people, will end up determining material conditions - and they do so by ‘naturalizing’ our

perception of the social facts: we take as ‘natural’ situations that are in fact historical, i.e.,

situations that came into existence in a specific historical moment with the purpose of

protecting the material interests of the ruling class of a given society against the action of the

opposing classes.

In the twentieth century, there was an artist who was concerned with the problem of

art transmitting the ideology of the ruling class (sometimes willingly, but in most cases, not)

and inducing the public to a passive attitude in relation to the conditions of life in society. I

am talking of the German theatre director and dramatist Bertolt Brecht. When analyzing King

Lear, I will now and then refer to Brecht’s practice and theory, due to the fact that I will

investigate some compositional techniques that Shakespeare makes use of, which make us not

take for granted some ideological constructs presented in the play (and which could possibly

have had, in many cases, analogous effects on the audience of his times). After having said

this, I want to make clear that Brecht is a useful theoretical reference concerning this matter,

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but I am not equating Shakespeare to the German dramatist. Brecht had a clear political

agenda for the plays he wrote, and this was certainly not the case with Shakespeare. Also,

there are some compositional devices employed by Shakespeare which might remind us of

Brecht’s techniques, but I will also examine in detail other artifices which precisely make

Shakespeare very different from Brecht. To sum up, Brecht is a useful theoretical reference

for the purposes of this thesis, but he is not a parameter to measure the Bard.

Brecht devised a theatre whose purpose was precisely to ‘denaturalize’ our perception

of social facts in the capitalistic societies, which are presented as “natural”, when in fact they

are historical. (And, of course, Brecht’s theatre wished to entertain while doing this, and not

lecturing the audience on socialist doctrine, as some bad leftwing theatre does.) He believed

that our perception of the social reality around us is conditioned by ever-repeating

representations which make us used to think and behave in a certain way, and that such

representations are also present in art and, more specifically, in the theatre. He also believed

that, when theatrical performances repeated such representations, they were not doing this in a

conscious manner in most cases - such representations were being repeated because these

artists were themselves used to present things in a certain way, when these could be presented

in another way (and by doing this, they were conditioning the audience to accept the reality

around them, and in many cases these artists were doing this unwillingly, unconsciously).

Brecht instead wanted a theatre that developed a critical perception about reality, instead of an

art that lead the public to accept life “as it is”. He also perceived that it was not a matter of

replacing one representation by another, “more progressive” one. What was needed was a

change in the manner that the audience perceived the theatrical representation; and

consequently, the ideological representation it was used to; and finally, the surrounding

reality. Brecht’s aim was not a critical perception in a purely intellectual manner - as a good

Marxist, he believed in praxis, and he wanted to change reality itself. This change in the

perception of the audience implied technical changes in the aesthetic organization of both the

theatrical performance and the written drama, and so, Brecht studied the non-empathic

construction of comedy, the oriental theatre, and certain manifestations of popular art.13 He

also studied the non-illusionist techniques of the Elizabethan drama and staging for this

purpose, and he was so influenced by those, that he adapted two plays of the period: in the

twenties he adapted Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, and circa 1949 he adapted

Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.

Brecht also studied theory that could help him for his purposes. In the 1910s and

1920s there was a specific literary theory which dealt with the manner that art (or, more

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specifically, literature) offered a different perception of reality. This theory was the Russian

formalism, and the author that influenced Brecht more specifically in this sense was Viktor

Shklovsky. One of Shklovsky’s most important concepts is that of ‘defamiliarization’ or

‘estrangement’ (in Russian, ostranenie). Shklovsky believes that the routine, the demands of

our everyday existence require that we ‘automatize’ our perception of reality. And against

this, we have the purpose of art, which is precisely to provide a different perception of things

that we take for granted in our everyday life - with art, our perception shifts from an

automatic perception to an ‘artistic’, i.e., unusual one, and by this, we acquire a more ‘real’

perception of the object than the one we were used to. (And here we can recall the saying of

the expressionist painter Paul Klee, according to which, art does not reproduce what we see -

it makes us see.)14 Shklovsky studied more specifically the technical devices which made the

effect of ‘estrangement’ possible in literature, and he developed a concept that was very dear

to the twentieth-century modernist art in general, and to Brecht, more specifically: according

to Shklovsky, art must ‘lay bare’ its own structuring, so that the public perceives it as the

artistic construction it actually is, and not merely as the illusionist reproduction of something

else.

Another concept of the Russian formalists which was widely used by Brecht is that of

the difference between ‘story’ and ‘plot’. This difference had already been established by

Aristotle, but the Russian formalists put a strong and specific emphasis on the ‘plot’. We can

say that the ‘story’ are the events present in it, while the ‘plot’ is the specific arrangement of

these events for narrative purposes: according to the manner such events are disposed, the

narrative will generate different effects upon the reader - and so, two different fictional works

might present exactly the same events, but the aesthetic effect generated by one will be quite

different from the other, precisely because of the differences in the ‘plot’, the organization of

the events. A narrative is not just what it tells, but also, and mainly, how it tells - and so, we

get to the famous formalist saying that “form is content”. For instance, if the author who is

writing a fictional work changes the usual arrangement of the events, so that the plot deviates

from what a reader would normally expect, he will be calling the attention of the reader to the

structure of the work itself, and not only to the story.15

This is a principle which Brecht applied for his theatre (concerning both the drama he

wrote and the theatrical performances he directed). However, there is a very important

difference between Brecht’s ‘dialectic theatre’ and the theories of the Russian formalists:

when these theorists say that ‘form is content’, they are being very literal about it, which is

not the case of the German director. For the Russian formalists, there is no such a thing as

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‘content’: the ‘story’, the ideas, the theme, the historical context of the writer are not relevant

elements - the only thing that really counts is the formal arrangement of the fiction, the

technical devices that the author makes use of in order to compose his fictional work; the rest

is deemed irrelevant.

Brecht, for his turn, has a different understanding of “form is content”. He differs

from the Russian theorists in that he believes that what the author has to say is really

important, it is not a mere excuse to show his dexterity in the formal organization of a

fictional work. Nevertheless, the formal organization of such fiction will strongly influence

the effect that it exerts on the public, and the content itself will be affected by the manner in

which the author makes use of the technical devices he is dealing with. Brecht also wrote

non-dramatic literature, but his life and focus was the theatre, and when he thought of content,

this meant mainly political content. In Brecht’s dialectic theatre, the concepts of the Russian

formalists are applied to call the attention of the spectator to the artificiality of the theatrical

scene, but this is not a goal in itself - in the dialectic theatre, the director’s main purpose is to

denaturalize the perception of the spectator, as well as the expectations that he has for the

scene, in order to also denaturalize his perception of life under capitalism. An aesthetic shock

must be generated, but this is not a goal in itself: the frustration of the audience’s

expectations concerning the narrative, for instance, must generate an awareness in the

spectator that the situations presented on stage are not ‘natural’; the events represented could

have had a different outcome, if the characters had chosen other possibilities of action.

To do this, the performance in the dialectic theatre must generate contradictions

between the assorted scenic elements, so that the structure of the theatrical scene is ‘laid bare’,

and the spectator does not identify with what he sees on stage. (A famous Brecht saying is, “I

laugh of those who cry, I cry because of those who laugh.”) Let us see some examples of

scenic contradictions in Brecht’s lines: a) Just like the Russian formalists propose, the ‘plot’

(the formal arrangement of the events) is more important than the story; thus, the dramatic

action can - even must - be interrupted precisely in the climactic moments, so that the

staging can introduce critical comments concerning the action that was being presented; b)

The physical action of the actor can often go precisely in the opposite way of the speech that

he is saying; c) The soundtrack must not enhance the emotional content of the scene, as is

usual; instead, it must provoke emotional detachment (for instance, a sentimental scene

should have some cheerful music as its soundtrack); d) The scenes must be preceded by titles

that are ironical about the content to be presented, or that generate an expectation which is to

be broken soon.

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An important aspect concerning Brecht’s conception of a political theatre is that it

does not exclude the possibility of spectatorial empathy with a character (up to a certain

degree). By ‘empathy’, I mean the emotional identification between spectator and character -

let us recall that a more traditional theatrical approach will precisely establish as many points

of contact between spectator and character as possible, and this will happen during the whole

spectacle. This is certainly not Brecht’s goal - he wants the spectator precisely to criticize

the actions of the character. However, the spectator cannot keep critical distance all the time,

otherwise he will not be interested in the spectacle. Thus, there must be a balance between

empathy and critical distance. The scene provides enough empathy for the spectator to be

interested in what will happen to the character - or what he will do -, but it will also feature

breaks that generate aesthetic shocks, in order that the audience does not get overwhelmed by

the character’s emotions, and is able to “laugh at those who cry”, as Brecht would say - and

by this, Brecht did not mean that he wanted his audience to be sadistic; they should perceive

that, if the character had chosen another course of action instead of the one he did, he would

not end up crying.

In order that the estrangement generated by the theatrical scene carries a political

content, the action presented must be necessarily historicized - that is, the spectator perceives

that the course of action chosen by the character on stage is not ‘natural’ and ‘inevitable’; it is

not ‘essential’ or ‘typical of all men’. It happens this way due to certain circumstances; if the

historical circumstances were different, the character would have chosen a different course of

action. More important than that, the spectator must perceive that the character could have

chosen a different course of action in the precise situation that he is facing, if he had a better

awareness of the historical moment.16 There are basically two manners by which the

dramatist or the theatre director can historicize a situation:

a) When presenting past events, the theatrical scene situates them within the context of

the society in which they happened, relating those to the main conflicts of those times

- at the same time, the scene will relate such historical facts to the spectator’s present,

so that he reflects either on the similarity or on the difference of the present moment in

relation to the past;

b) When showing present events, the scene must make it clear that the present moment is

not the culmination of the historical process (as positivist historiography would put it).

Our present moment will also be regarded in a critical manner in the future. The

theatrical scene must allow the spectator, thus, to put in historical perspective the

present moment in which he lives.

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I would like now to talk about the terminology that I employ in this thesis when I

refer to Brecht’s concepts. Since the Russian formalists were an important inspiration for

him, Brecht took Shklovsky’s term ostranenie (the Russian word for ‘estrangement’) and

translated it into German (Verfremdung). Thus, he called the effect that he wanted to provoke

on the spectator Verfremdungseffekt, or, to shorten, V-effekt, as it ended up being usually

called. As I said, Brecht’s term means precisely ‘estrangement’, but it differs from the

Russian ostranenie because of its explicitly political aspect. In English, it is called either V-

effekt (as in German) or ‘alienation effect’. Being a Brazilian, I do not feel at ease with the

word ‘alienation’ - as a false cognate, it might recall for Latin Americans precisely the

opposite of what Brecht intended. For this reason, I will call it V-effekt, as it is to be

sometimes found also in English.17

So, I will make use of the term V-effekt when examining certain formal devices in

King Lear which remind me of Brecht’s theatre (regarding the aspect of a politically critical

perception of the events presented in the scene). As I said, though, Shakespeare might have

been an important source of inspiration for Brecht, but the English dramatist does not have a

political agenda for his drama. Very frequently, the effect Shakespeare provokes on the

spectator or the reader is one of a critical perception, but not necessarily a political one. In

such situations, I will make use of the term ‘estrangement’, which is devoid of political

connotation.

Sometimes, I will also make use of the term ‘detachment’, as used by Kent Cartwright.

In his book Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double: The Rhythms of Audience Response,18

Cartwright analyzes the relation of the audience to Shakespeare’s tragedies as one in which

the spectator of these plays is not just emotionally engaged, but he will also have moments of

aesthetic distance. Cartwright employs the word ‘detachment’ in a relation of dichotomy to

the term ‘engagement’, and he explains the dynamics of the alternation between these two

poles in the theatrical performance of a Shakespearean tragedie as it follows,

I view “engagement” as the audience’s surrender of self-awareness through empathy, sympathy, or identification; detachment as the audience’s sense of its autonomy, experienced as doubt, evaluation, mediated emotion . . . A tragedy’s overall movement in spectatorial distance - generally, from engagement through detachment to a heightened balancing of the two - confers upon spectators an empowering sense of openness and possibility (wonder) in the tragic moment.19

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It is possible to make an analogy between the terminology employed by Cartwright of

‘engagement/detachment’, and Brecht’s ‘empathy/critical distance’. In spite of this, they do

not mean exactly the same thing. In the case of Cartwright’s ‘detachment’, this term means a

cooling of the emotional temperature of the spectator so that he can evaluate what is

happening in the scene, but not necessarily criticize it, or put in a political perspective, as

Brecht’s V-effekt. (I do not mean that Cartwright’s ‘detachment’ cannot overlap with those

functions, but this is not the focus of his study.) And so, I will add a third term to V-effekt and

‘estrangement’, and this is ‘detachment’, meaning a moment in the scene when our empathy

with a character cedes to doubt and evaluation about what this character is up to in that

moment - but with no political resonance to it.

2.6 OTHER THEORETICAL SOURCES

2.6.1 THE FORMALIST-STRUCTURALIST CONTINUUM

The theoretical approach employed for analyzing the F version of King Lear is

basically a Marxist one, but I decided to make use of other approaches used for literary

criticism, whenever I felt that these would complement and enrich the analysis of the play.

(Let us recall that Marxism itself is not a “pure” theory. In fact, Marx formulated his theory

based on a very eclectic blend: the philosophy of Hegel, the nascent economic studies, the

writings of what he called ‘Utopian socialists’, and the materialistic thinking of Feuerbach -

and it is possible that I have forgotten other sources.) The study of a literary work,

concerning the effects that it causes (or might cause) on its readers, has to take into account

the technical devices employed by the author, so that the critic tries to grasp the aesthetic

effect that the author tried to achieve when writing the play. Nevertheless, trying to

understand the aesthetic procedures of the author is not enough; one must also take into

account the public that gets in touch with the play. Now, King Lear is a work that was written

four centuries ago - and so, I believe that the critic should not think only of the present-day

public, but, whenever it is possible, he should try to know about the public for King Lear in

Shakespeare’s times; the reception was certainly very different from now, and the

comprehension of such circumstances would help us understand some of the procedures the

author made use of at the time of writing the play. Another factor to be taken into

consideration when one thinks of the public (past or present) for King Lear is that

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Shakespeare did not write his plays to be published as a book, i.e., to be read. Plays are

written to be performed (but, of course, they can also be read). This means that, when writing

about King Lear, I cannot think of one abstract public, but of three instances of reception: the

audience of Shakespeare’s times; the audiences of the present times; the readers of the present

times. In terms of social environment, this means both Jacobean England and the

contemporary, globalized world. In terms of analyzing the possibilities of reception, this

means that Shakespeare on page must go hand in hand with Shakespeare on stage.20

Two poles: production and reception. As for the production, i.e., the aesthetic effects

that stem from specific procedures in the making of the play, I will make use, whenever it is

necessary, of general notions from the formalist-structuralist continuum. I say ‘formalist-

structuralist continuum’ instead of splitting it into two different groups of literary theory,

because I perceive structuralism more as a development of the Russian formalism than as a

departure from it. I will not resort to a specific theorist of either of these two schools, but

there are some general notions that helped me in elaborating my analysis of King Lear.

Shklovsky’s notions of ‘estrangement’ and ‘laying bare the structure’ are there, either through

the mediation of Brecht, or in a somewhat more direct manner: because Shakespeare’s plays

do not have a clear political orientation, not every moment of ‘estrangement’ in King Lear can

be analyzed as if it were analogous to Brecht’s V-effekt (although several moments are).

The notion developed by Tynianov of an evolution in the literary genres and forms, by

understanding that literary texts are products of the entire literary system, was also helpful for

me when I was trying to relate King Lear to the dramaturgic production in Elizabethan and

Jacobean England (as in Chapter 7) as well as to non-dramatic literary genres that were read

by many in Shakespeare’s audience (as in Chapters 3 and 7). In this case, however, its

usefulness for my study was much more general than the concepts of Shklovsky.

From structuralism I took some very general notions provided by narratology

concerning narrative rules which, for their turn, generate specific expectations both for the

audience and the readers. When an author such as Shakespeare provides unexpected turns to

his scenes, he is breaking specific narrative rules that the readers and the audience share in

common. If such rules did not mean anything, King Lear would not result so surprising for

us. I also owe to structuralism the idea of opposing the narrative structure of King Lear in a

synchronic relation to the history of early modern England (more specifically, concerning the

development of the class struggle in such times) as I do in Chapter 5.21 In both of these cases,

I am not resorting to any specific theorist, but instead, I am influenced by general notions.

The only case in which I could really mention a theorist of structuralism in relation to my

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thesis happens in a very mediated form, and is that of Claude Lévi-Strauss. The notion that he

presents in his Structural Anthropology of the use of aesthetic structuring to solve in a

symbolic manner a conflict that is present in a given society (and which cannot be solved by

practical means in that moment) was appropriated by the aesthetic theories of Marxist thinkers

so different form each other as Ernst Fischer and Fredric Jameson, both of whom have

influenced this thesis.

2.6.2 THE AESTHETICS OF RECEPTION

The author of a literary work has certain intentions about it, and he will make use of

specific formal procedures in order to achieve the aesthetic effects that he wishes, but this

work will not be complete without the reader - it is he, after all, that will provide meaning to

the literary work. And, of course, the meaning that the reader will provide will depend on the

social environment in which he lives, his historical conditions, his life experience, and the

information he has had access to prior to his contact with the fictional work - and by

information I mean very much the fiction that he has got in touch with, and which will make

him used to certain narrative conventions and, consequently, will generate certain

expectations concerning the future fiction that he will read.

The literary theory that deals specifically with such concerns is called ‘aesthetics of

reception’, and was proposed by Hans Robert Jauss. Jauss coined the term ‘horizon of

expectations’, and by this he meant two things that intertwine. The first meaning for ‘horizon

of expectations’ is the set of expectations that the reader presents when he picks a book from

the shelf and starts reading. (Of course we can transfer this concept to other, non-literary

possibilities of receiving fictional narratives. One has got a set of expectations also when he

buys a ticket in the cinema or the theatre venue, and starts watching the movie or the play, or

when he sits on the couch to watch a detective series on the TV.) As I said, there are

personal, individual factors that stem from one’s life experience, which will influence one’s

expectations about such a fiction; there are also social factors, such as the social class, or the

nationality, or the religion of the reader/viewer; and there are, of course, historical factors: one

will probably not receive a work of fiction in the same way if he reads it now, or within

twenty years.

‘Horizon of expectations’ also carries another meaning to it. When someone picks a

book from the shelf and starts reading it, we can be sure that this will not be the first time that

he gets in touch with a fictional work. He has read other fictional works before, he has

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watched films or plays, and so on. Now, it does not matter how much the author of a fiction

strives, there is no such a thing as an absolutely original fictional work. In one way or

another, it will always present some degree of similarity to fictional works that were

previously produced. This does not mean that originality is impossible - it certainly is

feasible; but originality starts from elements that are already known from the reader, and

then, when the reader thinks he is reading something he is somewhat acquainted with, the

author of the original work will subvert the expectation of the reader, and introduce the

unknown. Let us forget for a moment the ‘culinary’ fiction - that is, the fiction that presents

no aesthetic surprises at all. Let us think of the works that present original traces in

comparison to what has been previously done. Some of them will present originality to a

lesser extent, others will be original in so many aspects that they might provoke a shock.

Nevertheless, even these will have to present ‘non-original’ elements, for the reader must

recognize what he is reading if he is to be shocked. (Susan Bennett puts this in a nice way,

“Avant-garde texts are thus never completely ‘new’ - if they were they would be

incomprehensible . .”)22 Such a reader will have expectations, for instance, about the course

of events in a certain moment of a novel. He has read works that presented similarities to this

one he is presently reading. And so, in all moments, regarding whatever situation presented,

there are two possibilities: either the outcome will be the same as in other fictional works the

reader has been exposed to, or it will not. (These last sentences in this paragraph will

probably remind you of things we have already discussed when we were examining some

aspects of the Russian formalism. And this is not by chance - we have these two poles of

production and reception, and one depends completely on the other.)

As a consequence of all this, our reader has already established a criterion for

acknowledging if a fictional work has got quality or not. When he is reading this new novel

(for instance), he will be comparing it to other novels that he has read - some readers like to

be surprised, while others not, and so, it is unlikely that a fictional work will be unanimously

liked or disliked.

Up to now, I was talking of the horizon of expectations on a very individual level,

which is that of the aesthetic taste of each reader. We also have to take into consideration that

there are established social criteria for judging a literary work, and these change according to

the changes in society. Some works will be considered shocking or tasteless in a moment,

and decades later they will be very appreciated, while other works which are appreciated now

will be considered bad or irrelevant within some years.

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And here we get to what I consider the most important aspect of Jauss’s theory, which

is its concern with historicity. Literary works do not have fixed meanings, and also

concerning their aesthetic value they will be regarded differently, according to the

peculiarities of the historical moment. The importance of recovering the horizon of

expectations concerning a certain work in a certain period does not imply (in case we are

successful in knowing what such horizon was) that we get in touch with the “right opinion”,

and that we will have to adhere to such a view. What it means is that past and present will put

each other into perspective.

At this moment, I want to recall what I said a few pages before: the basal theory for

this thesis is Marxism, but other theories (the ones I am referring to in this part of the chapter)

are necessary to complement it. I am saying this because, right now, I will do the reverse

operation, and examine two aspects of the aesthetics of reception under the light of Marxism:

the first one is the concern that the aesthetics of reception has in regard to historicity. From a

Marxist perspective, I believe that, more than a dialogue between the past and the present,

what is necessary is to enhance the differences between the past and the present. When I say

this, I do not mean either that the past must “win” (and thus, we end up mourning the

“glorious” past), or that the present must “win” (and so, we arrive to a positivist interpretation

of History in which the present is the apex of progress). We need to establish the differences

in a critical manner, precisely to understand History as a process. By understanding the

peculiarities of the past, we might understand the peculiarities of the present. I believe that,

when this happens, it is always an active and positive factor in our concrete lives.

The second aspect concerning the aesthetics of reception vis-à-vis Marxism is that, if

we want to somehow recover aspects of the reception of King Lear in Jacobean England, we

must have in mind that this play was presented in the Globe (among other venues), a

playhouse that strived to appeal to all social classes in London (or almost). The consequence

is that, concerning such theatrical events, there will not be such a thing as “the (consensual)

Jacobean horizon of expectations” - different social classes would view King Lear (for

example) with different eyes, and we must take this into account.23

2.6.3 THE THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE CRITICISM

Jauss’s aesthetics of reception deals with the reading public - and at this moment we

have to take into consideration that King Lear is a play, that is, a text that can be read, but was

produced strictly for performance purposes. And so, one must also, and very much, think of

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the theatre audiences when examining the possibilities concerning the reception pole. (You

must have noticed that I wrote “also think of the audience”, and not “only think of the

audience”. After all, the historical conditions of transmission for the plays of the

Shakespearean canon on a global scale have generated a situation in which the plays of the

English dramatist have probably been more read than watched - and this also if we add to the

theatrical performance other possibilities of production, such as the cinema and the

television.)

When thinking of the theatrical performance of King Lear or any other Shakespeare

play, we must also bear in mind the peculiar situation of the director and the actor. Both are

situated at the same time in the poles of production and reception. Just like the non-

specialized reader and the literary critic, both director and actor read the text of Shakespeare

and interpret it - that is, they provide meaning to it, since the text does not “speak” or

“mean” on its own. And, at the same time, they produce meaning also by producing a ‘new

text’ - for the theatrical performance is a new text itself, an unprinted one, which stems from

the written drama, but at the same time, as W. B. Worthen states, it is necessarily another

text.24 (Even if a staging of a play by Shakespeare is intent on being orthodox and performing

the play “as it is”, it still will be the interpretation of the director and the actors, which reflects

their own situation and concerns, and which is historically situated: if the same ensemble

produces King Lear in 1996 and again in 2006, it will be two different King Lears - also if

the text is rigorously the same, and if they are intent on doing in 2006 “the same thing” they

did in 1996. In ten years, the world will have changed, the audience will have changed, the

theatrical ensemble will have changed, and thus, their King Lear will have changed too, also

if against their own will.)

As a consequence, the work of a literary critic who is analyzing a play by Shakespeare

will profit more if he also has in mind the reality of the work on the stage. Since drama is

written for the concrete purpose of being performed, there are aspects in a play which will be

illuminated if we think of the concrete circumstances of the work on stage - the aesthetic

choices that the theatrical ensemble makes when rehearsing and staging a play, and the

reaction of the audience to such a performance. If the empiric element of the theatrical labour

is in the mind of the literary critic, it will probably add to his analysis. Let us think of the

writings of theatre directors such as Stanislavski and Peter Brook, and we will recall the fresh

insights they were able to have working with their actors on specific written drama, insights

which could not be reached by a literary criticism that approached drama as if it were only to

be properly understood in its printed form.25 This does not mean that the literary critic who is

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analyzing drama must be a man of the theatre. What he must do anyway, whether he is more

familiar with the labour of the theatre and the circumstances of the audience or not, is keep in

mind the following notion: the aim of the written drama is to be enacted on the stage, not to

be read in printed form - the literary criticism that does not take this extraliterary reality into

account is an analysis that has failed in recognizing the reality of its object.

After saying this, I want to explain some terminology that might be found in one

moment or the other in this thesis. When analyzing the action of a specific character, we

might talk about his ‘aim’ or ‘goal’; when analyzing a certain speech, we might wonder what

the ‘intention’ of such utterance is. I will seldom employ such terminology - instead, I will

use a term coined by the Russian theatre director Constantin Stanislavski. This term is

‘objective’, and it can mean both the aim and the intention of a specific character.

The last thing to say is that, since the 1970s, the literary criticism of Shakespeare’s

plays has seen the growth of what has been termed ‘performance criticism’. This is an area of

literary criticism that bridges the gap between that literary criticism which does not take into

account the reality of the stage, and the theatre studies (whose object, as the name says, is

non-literary). One could say that performance criticism about Shakespeare’s drama deals

mainly with two topics: the analysis of a written text regarding its possibilities of performance

on the stage; or, establishing a relation between a specific staging of a Shakespeare play to the

text itself (or still, comparing different stagings of the same play) - all in all, this is literary

criticism that features an interface in relation to the theatre studies.26

It is time then to start a new chapter and go to another phase. From the next page on,

we are going to analyze the F version of King Lear.

ENDNOTES

(1) Even if this economicist reasoning is to be found in the works of Engels, this does not happen in such a consistent manner as in the institutional Marxism of the twentieth century - there are moments in which the thinking of Engels is truly dialectic. (2) This can be found in Marx’s Introduction to: A Contribution to the Critique of Political

Economy, which is available in the Internet. (See Works Consulted for website.) (3) Antonio Candido’s essay ‘Dialética da Malandragem’ can be found in the volume O Discurso e a Cidade. It is very well complemented by an essay which Roberto Schwarz has written about it, called ‘Pressupostos, Salvo Engano, de Dialética da Malandragem’, which is to be found in the volume Que Horas São?.

(4) In Karl Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, which is available in the Internet. (See Works Consulted for website.)

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(5) Such notions about History and mediation are to be found in the Chapter 1 of Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious. (6) Idem, Chapter 1. (7) In my opinion, the best Marxist thinkers are those ones which cannot be described satisfactorily as ‘thinkers’ or ‘theorists’ because they are in fact doers, men of praxis. Let us think of Brecht: many think that he developed a theory, and afterwards he applied it to his works – in fact, it was just the opposite. Being a man of the theatre, he dealt with the practical reality of his profession: he would come to grips with practical and concrete problems, and, at the same time, he reflected on theoretical questions. In his praxis, he arrived to practical solutions, and, only after that, he would theorize and write about his notions of the epic drama, and, later on, of the dialectic theatre. And, because his labour in the theatre lasted for decades, new problems would always arrive, and with them new solutions, as well as reformulating what he theorized before - and changes would be many times very radical. For this reason, what Brecht thought in the thirties, for instance, was not the same thing that he thought in the fifties. By this, I do not mean that he was not concerned with theory - he was, and very much, but, as he was involved in effective praxis, he theorized in and with his practice. I could also mention the example of the educator Paulo Freire, which can be compared to Brecht in this sense of praxis. And I want to mention another outstanding Latin American example of the praxis which integrates practice and Marxist theory: I am thinking of the Argentinean theatre director and acting teacher Raúl Serrano. His book Tesis Sobre Stanislavski is the best account that I have ever read on the ‘method of physical actions’ devised by the Russian theatre director Constantin Stanislavski in his last years. In this book, Raúl Serrano develops his own elaboration about Stanislavski’s method of physical actions at the same time that he elaborates on Marx’s concern about integrating theory and practice. Reading this book helped me understand better, not “only” Stanislavski’s last work as well as the epistemic problems related to acting, but it also helped me understand Marx better. (8) In David Hawkes’ Ideology, p. 98. (9) Idem, p. 95. (10) Ibid., pp. 94-5. (11) Ibid., p. 94. (12) See Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, pp. 88-9. (13) For brief information on this, see my essay ‘Pai Contra Mãe: O Dia Em Que Machado Encontrou-se Com Brecht’. For more detailed information, see the chapter ‘O Efeito de Distanciamento: O Conceito’ in Gerd Bornheim’s Brecht: A Estética do Teatro. Bornheim’s book is a precious, thorough source of information and reflection on Brecht’s work. (14) See Viktor Shklovsky’s essay ‘A Arte Como Procedimento’ in Teoria da Literatura: Formalistas Russos (edited by Dionísio de Oliveira Toledo) . See also Raman Selder’s A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, p. 33, as well as my essay above mentioned. (15) See Selder, pp. 35-6. (16) In order to make this point clear for the reader, Brecht picks examples precisely from King Lear in his essay ‘O Teatro Experimental’, pp. 135-6, in Teatro Dialético: Ensaios (edited by Luís Carlos Maciel). (17) In a reverse manner, this is the reason why I chose to employ in 2.3 the term ‘alienated labour’ for the phenomenon studied by Marx, instead of ‘estranged labour’, which is how this is usually called in English.. (18) Kent Cartwright’s approach in his Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double is not political (even though he provides many important data about historical circumstances regarding King Lear), and his study on spectatorial distance

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regarding Shakespeare’s tragedies is not focused on a Brechtian concern for the spectator’s political awareness, but, as Cartwright puts it on p. ix, on “an Artaudian concern for the effect of performance upon an audience”. This is a book whose reading I recommend very much, especially its Chapter 4 about King Lear. Although Cartwright’s close reading deals with the Q version (which bears many important differences in relation to the F version which is the corpus of this thesis) and his conclusions differ many times from mine, his approach provided many insights which were important for the close reading I did of F. (19) In Cartwright’s Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double, pp. ix-x. (20) It will probably be noticed that, when talking of the possibilities of reception of King Lear in the present times, I am referring to a very general, “globalized” public, instead of mentioning something more specific, such as a Latin American - or, even more specific, Brazilian - public. This happens because, when thinking of the specific reception of King Lear in Brazil, one does not have a very long story to tell. There were very few stagings of this play in the history of the Brazilian theatre, and King Lear does not get to be a household name, either among the cultured public of Brazil that reads drama or goes to the theatre, or among the artists of the theatre (I can think of at least eight plays by Shakespeare which are better known in Brazil than King Lear.) (21) And, as I said before in this chapter, I also owe this idea very much to the synchronic relation that Antonio Candido establishes in his essay ‘Dialética da Malandragem’ between the structure of the novel Memórias de Um Sargento de Milícias and the class dynamics of the Rio de Janeiro society in the early nineteenth century - that work combines Marxism and structuralism. (22) In Susan Bennett’s Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, p. 49. (23) The King’s Men performed King Lear for the Court of James I in the Christmas of 1606. (Due to the year, we can be sure that it was the Q version.) What I want to call your attention to, is that, in the theatre, the audience effectively makes the spectacle. This has to do not only with the behaviour of the audience (for instance, if it receives the performance in a more enthusiastic way or not), but also with the manner they view the performance due to their social horizon of expectations. In the Court of James I, King Lear was certainly received in a situation of a monolithic class view, with no dissonances amid the spectators in this regard. This was certainly not the situation in the Globe: in the open amphitheatres such as the Globe, different classes would have different reactions to the scenes presented (as we are going to see in Chapter 7), and it was probably not different with King Lear. It comes to my mind that Brecht, for his turn, did not look for an approving consensus in his spectacles - on the opposite, he wished precisely that spectators of different classes reacted in different ways to his plays, and he saw such a conflict approvingly. It is very probable that, when he thought of this, he took the open amphitheatres of the Elizabethan Age as a model. (24) I agree with W. B. Worthen when he says that the theatrical performance is a text in itself (in Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance, especially in Chapter 1). Another notion developed by him in this work, and which is inspired by the post-structuralist Barthes, is that of equating the theatrical performance, the literary critic and the reader, in that each of them, by interpreting a written play, are all creating new texts. This is a very interesting idea that gives food for thought, but one that I do not agree with. In this, I agree with Fredric Jameson, who says he believes that a text has got a finite number of interpretive possibilities. (See Jameson’s The Political

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Unconscious, pp. 31-2.) I am a firm believer in our possibility of appropriating and making the old texts new by means of an act of interpretation inscribed into the historical moment, but I still consider the intentions of the author an essential element, otherwise we would be denying this author any possibility of agency. In most cases, we cannot know for sure what the intention of the author was, and this is especially true for Shakespeare. However, I go with Brecht and the Russian formalists in that the form speaks for the author. The consequence is that understanding the form is a means of “communicating with this dead author” – if we want to be truly dialectical, we must be aware not only of the present moment, but also of the past, and this means that, regardless of how wide the interpretive possibilities of a text are, we still do not have infinite possibilities of interpretation. And this is not an attitude of respect for the dead, this is respect for ourselves. (25) W. B. Worthen says about this, “The sense that performance is merely a reiteration of writing is a commonly held understanding of stage drama.” (See his Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance, p. 15). (26) W.B. Worthen, in his Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance, discusses the question of a performance of a Shakespeare text having an independent authority of its own which is not subordinate to the written text, as opposed to the prevailing view in performance criticism, according to which, theatrical performances illuminate the text by discovering concrete possibilities in it which have not been experimented yet. In Chapter 4 he presents a discussion about several points of view concerning performance criticism, and his own view of the subject is informed by post-structuralist theory, especially the writings of Barthes from 1970 on.

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3 I.1: A FORCE DISPELS

Let us start the analysis of the play by examining the very beginning of Act I, Scene

1, where we find two noblemen enjoying a conversation,

[Enter Kent, Gloucester and Edmund] Kent - I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall. Gloucester - It did always seem so to us, but now in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the dukes he values most, for qualities are so weighed that curiosity in neither can make choice of either’s moiety.

At once, in a quite simple exchange we have the presentation of the scene’s situation -

the kingdom is to be divided but no one is sure about the criteria used for doing so, or the

outcome of the King’s decision. It is a curious fact that, when talking about the coming

division of the kingdom, Gloucester mentions indirectly Lear’s two eldest daughters, Goneril

and Regan (by referring to their respective husbands, Albany and Cornwall), but leaves aside

the youngest one, Cordelia. Rather than being a case of bad memory or disdain, one should

remember that Cordelia is not exactly the best candidate for Lear’s succession. According to

the rules of the English medieval nobility concerning this matter (which have gone on through

the Renaissance),1 sons had the precedence over daughters, and when there were not male

heirs, the eldest daughter would precede the younger one. Another obstacle for any royal

aspirations which somebody in Cordelia’s situation might have is that she is not married, and

thus, will generate no successors. Probably for those reasons Gloucester does not refer to her

when talking about the division of the kingdom.

Let us proceed to I.1.7-32,

Kent - Is not this your son, my lord? Gloucester - His breeding, sir, hath been at my charge. I have so often blushed to acknowledge him that now I am brazed to’t. Kent - I cannot conceive you.

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Gloucester - Sir, this young fellow’s mother could, whereupon she grew round-wombed and had indeed, sir, a son for her cradle ere she had a husband for her bed. Do you smell a fault? Kent - I cannot wish the fault undone, the issue of it being so proper. Gloucester - But I have a son, sir, by order of law, some year elder than this, who yet is no dearer in my account. Though this knave came something saucily to the world before he was sent for, yet was his mother fair; there was good sport at his making, and the whoreson must be acknowledged. Do you know this noble gentleman, Edmund? Edmund - No, my lord. Gloucester - My lord of Kent. Remember him hereafter as my honourable friend. Edmund - My services to your lordship. Kent - I must love you, and sue to know you better. Edmund - Sir, I shall study deserving. Gloucester - He hath been out nine years, and away he shall again. The King is coming.

Spicy dialogues are not the exclusive province of Shakespeare. They were a common

feature in the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, but the excerpt above shows a number of

aspects which are worth noticing. The first of them is that, even though Gloucester says he

loves his two sons - the legitimate and the bastard one - just the same way (“But I have a

son, sir, by order of law, some year elder than this, who yet is no dearer in my account.”), he

refers to Edmund and his mother in such a scornful manner that it gets to be shocking. In the

same spirit, he describes the young man’s conception in sordid details. So we have

Gloucester declaring his equal love for his two children at the same time that he is cracking

disdainful jokes about the younger one. It is worth asking how such a dialogue would affect a

contemporary theatre audience (that is, middle-class people who enjoy going to the theatre).

This is not so difficult to answer: we tend to be politically correct about the matter of having

and raising children. Whether they are conceived within the bonds of marriage or not, we all

agree children must be raised with love, and we do not treat such matters jokingly - this is

too serious a subject! Thus, when we watch or read Gloucester’s jokes about Edmund, it is

not a sure bet that we will laugh along with him. And even if we laugh, this will probably

cause us a feeling of uneasiness. Let us now think of Shakespeare’s original audience: how

would they have reacted to this? We do not know for sure, although there are good studies

about this subject which could provide a hint about it. It is not the case to try an answer right

now; however, I believe it would be useful to keep this question in mind, for it might help us

in a later moment.

At this moment, I believe I owe an explanation to those readers who do not work with

the theatre, and this is about a working principle for theatre directors and actors: the

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indications in the stage directions of who enters and who exits the scene are fundamental

information - if there is no stage direction such as [Exit (or ‘Exeunt’) Edmund], this means

that he remains in the scene. We see that, right at the beginning of the scene, Edmund enters

together with Gloucester and Kent. Since there is no indication that Edmund leaves the scene,

we assume this is an indication of the author that this character will be present during the

whole I.1, even if silent.2

Let us go back to the dialogue above. However short, this initial exchange raises other

questions: although Edmund is present in the scene all the time, his father talks about him as

if he were not there at all, until the moment he introduces one to the other. And not just that:

we have here an inversion of the rules of etiquette. According to those, the less important

person should be introduced to the more important one. So we have on one side this young

man who also happens to be a bastard (and his father is not really neutral about the fact), and

on the other a nobleman, an earl who also happens to be older than Edmund. Thus, the usual

thing to happen would be presenting Edmund to Kent. Nevertheless, it happens just the

opposite way.

The last aspect I would like to call your attention to, are the last lines of Kent and

Edmund in this excerpt,

Edmund - My services to your lordship. Kent - I must love you, and sue to know you better. Edmund - Sir, I shall study deserving.

As we know, none of this is going to happen in the play. In our specific case, we have

already read or watched King Lear, but if we come to think of people who are not familiar

with the play yet, and are getting in touch with it for the first time, this exchange may cause

expectations which will not be fulfilled.

Those very first lines of the play feature three aspects which generate a feeling of

estrangement either on the spectator or the reader. Besides, if one is to take Edmund and

Kent’s last lines too seriously, there will be a break of expectations. It is not by chance that

the beginning of the play features so many aspects of estrangement as well as a break of

expectations both for the spectator and the reader. Up to this moment, Shakespeare has not

touched the central subject of the play, but he has already presented structural elements which

will be present throughout King Lear.

Since I am talking of structural elements, I should better start dealing with this aspect

in a more explicit way. In a very curious manner, the characters start the scene by referring to

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the division of the kingdom in six brief lines, and then the conversation suddenly shifts to

Edmund and his bastardy for a quite longer time (twenty-four lines). As a consequence, the

matter of the division of the kingdom is resumed only in line 31, with Lear’s entrance. What

is peculiar to the structure of this scene is the fact that, right after introducing the situation,

there is a change to a quite more mundane topic, and this keeps so for a rather long time, until

the scene gets back to its main subject. This is quite uncommon. Why should the beginning

be built this way?

The first reason to occur is a quite obvious one: King Lear is a play built around a

double plot - one concerning Lear’s family, and the other concerning Gloucester’s. The

conversation around Lear’s succession is interrupted for about twenty-four lines which deal

with the conception of Edmund, and only after that we have the situation which was just

mentioned in the conversation. This could be perceived as an artifice which links the two

storylines from the very beginning, for the story of Gloucester’s family actually starts in the

next scene, I.2, and will intertwine with Lear’s story only in II.1.

The problem with this reasoning is, I do not think either the reader or the spectator will

be able to establish such connections the first time he reads or watches the play. From the

very moment the play starts, events succeed each other vertiginously. The focus in this part

of the play changes so quickly - from the succession to Edmund, and then back to the

division of the kingdom - that the reader and the spectator will hardly have a chance to

establish any connections between them. Actually, Gloucester and Kent’s first exchange

about the succession is so brief that, by the time the King enters, it is very likely that a 21st-

century audience will have Edmund’s bastardy more present than the matter of the succession

- in other words, from the point of view of the reader or the spectator who gets in touch with

this work for the first time, it is Lear’s entrance that actually sets this theme, and not the initial

dialogue of the two noblemen.

This is a quite unusual way to convene these two different themes. What would a

more conventional manner be like, then? If this play presented a more usual plot structure,

we would probably have first one scene wholly dedicated to the division of the kingdom, and

then a second scene dedicated to the conflict between the brothers Edgar and Edmund; this

second scene would be introduced by a character that took part in I.1 - possibly Gloucester.

Since a more usual construction would not present the intertwining of the Edmund theme into

I.1, the first scene would be totally dedicated to the division of the kingdom, and so, the

dialogue on the younger son’s bastardy would be either excised or transferred to the next

scene, since it doesn’t bear any clear relationship to Lear’s succession. According to this

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more conventional construction, Gloucester’s speech in line 6 (“ . . .curiosity in neither can

make choice of either’s moiety”) would be immediately followed by the one in line 32 (“The

King is coming.”), and the rest of the scene would follow as it was originally proposed.

However, this is not what happens with this scene. Why do we have this peculiar

construction?

I believe Shakespeare wished to interrupt the dialogue on the division of the kingdom

for reasons other than establishing a double plot, since this could be done in many other ways

which would be easier to follow, ways which could provide clearer hints to the spectator or

the reader (and he does this in other plays). What the author possibly wished by this

interruption, was not to give any hints, but instead to provide a feeling of puzzlement and

uncertainty. In a word, the reader and the spectator who are not familiar with the play will not

be quite sure about what comes next - and this from the very beginning. However, even the

spectator or the reader who already knows the play will feel some sort of displacement due to

this “strange intermission”. Subjects and situations interrupt each other continuously, and this

is to be seen in the rest of the play. In stranger and more aggressive ways, the play is built in

such a way that the audience’s expectations will be continuously frustrated in an ever-

evolving spiral of estrangement. This will happen not just by interruptions such as the one

above, but also by the absolutely unexpected outcome of situations all throughout the play.

Let us then analyze the following moment, which is the division of the kingdom,

properly speaking. This starts around l.1.32 with the entrance of Lear and his entourage

(Cornwall, Albany, Goneril, Regan, Cordelia, and attendants),

Lear - Attend the lords of France and Burgundy, Gloucester. Gloucester - I shall, my lord. [Exit] Lear - Meantime we shall express our darker purpose. / Give me the map there. Know that we have divided / In three our kingdom, and ‘tis our fast intent / To shake all cares and business from our age, / Conferring them on younger strengths, while we / Unburdened crawl toward death. Our son of Cornwall, / And you, our no less loving son of Albany, / We have this hour a constant will to publish / Our daughters’ several dowers, that future strife / May be presented now . . .

Before going on with Lear’s first speech, let us examine for a brief while the central

situation that goes exposed in these lines. For a long time it was commonplace in the ranks of

Shakespearean criticism to ascribe Lear’s decision concerning the division of the kingdom to

some degenerate, feeble state of mind, due to such causes as old age, folly, etc. (Indeed, Lear

will become a madman later on, but this has not happened yet.) I believe it is not really

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productive to psychologize Lear’s decision in such a way, since historical studies have

demonstrated that, in the feudal times, when there was no such a thing as the nation-state, it

was a quite common practice for aged kings to divide their kingdom while they were still

alive in order to avoid internecine wars. Thus, Lear’s action is orientated by a rationale, even

if it is a feudal one: the kingdom as some sort of private property to be inherited according to

the laws of succession - a rationale that certainly could not be defended anymore in the

beginning of the seventeenth century, when Shakespeare wrote King Lear.3

At this moment, it might be appropriate to recall Brecht’s notions of historicity and

estrangement, according to which historical facts and situations might cause us a sensation of

estrangement, due to the manner they differ from their present equivalents. At the same time,

it is exactly this difference from our present or other times which makes a certain situation

historical, and not eternal or essential. So, the estrangement we experience as readers or

spectators in front of the situation above is not caused by Lear’s senility, but, just the

opposite, by the normalcy of such a deed in the feudal times. Of course, this effect (which

reminds me so much of Brecht’s V-effekt) will be more powerful if this situation shown in the

theatrical scene, while keeping a clear difference to the audience’s situation, also bears some

sort of relationship to the present times – the audience’s reality – in any sense.4

One more brief observation concerns a stylistic aspect of Shakespeare’s writing, which

occurs in King Lear as well as in other plays: I am talking about the alternation of prose and

verse in the author’s plays. I would like to call your attention to the fact that the first dialogue

of I.1, featuring Gloucester, Kent and Edmund, is in prose, and Lear’s entrance provides a

shift in the writing style which turns then to verse. A current explanation for this – which I

believe is quite accurate – is that in the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama the noblemen and

other people of higher rank speak in blank verse, which confers them an elevate tone, while

the servants and other people from lower rank speak in prose. This would have to do with the

fact that, until quite recently, literature would present people from the subaltern classes only

in comedies and other literary genres which blended humour and earthier subjects. It is quite

clear that, being a king, Lear speaks in verse; Gloucester and Kent are noblemen, though.

Why should they start the play speaking in prose?

I believe this happens due to an ingenious device of Shakespeare’s, which guides the

expectations of the spectator and the reader. Even if the two mentioned characters are

noblemen, the fact that the play starts in prose is an auditory clue meant to prepare the

Jacobean audience for a down-to-earth subject, that is, a less important one (at least,

according to the ruling class’s point of view). And this is really what happens, since they start

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saying something about the division of the kingdom but shift immediately, and for a

reasonably long time, to Edmund’s bastardy. Now, when Lear enters and speaks in verse, the

Jacobean audience had another auditory clue that the subject would turn to something elevate,

that is, decorous and considered important by the ruling class.

One last thing to add about it: I started talking about estrangement and the break of

the audience’s expectations, and then, in these last paragraphs, I switched to something which

is not just different from these concepts, but even seems to go against them. Now I am

talking about a convention, i.e., about working according to the audience’s expectations, and

not against them. What actually happens is that there will be no break of expectations if these

are not first raised. If one perceives right from the beginning that the scene does not have

anything to do with the aesthetic rules he is used to, he will not engage with the play’s action.

Thus, the author first presents the expected conventions, and only after the audience is

engaged, he will start breaking expectations. In King Lear, this game reaches a sophisticated

level, and this right from the beginning, as we have seen in the artifice of the scene starting

with a subject and then immediately interrupting it, only to resume it some twenty-four lines

later.

Let us see the rest of Lear’s initial speech, and then what goes on between the King

and the people he is addressing at this moment, i.e., his three daughters (in I.1.44-81),

Lear - . . . The princes France and / Burgundy, / Great rivals in our youngest daughter’s love, / Long in our court have made their amorous sojourn, / And here are to be answered. Tell me, my daughters, / Since now we will divest us both of rule, / Interest of territory, cares of state, / Which of you shall we say doth love us most, / That we our largest bounty may extend / Where nature doth with merit challenge? Goneril, / Our eldest born, speak first. Goneril - Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter, / Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty, / Beyond what can be valued rich or rare; / No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honour; / As much as child e’er loved, or father found; / A love that makes breath poor and speech unable. / Beyond all manner of so much I love you. Cordelia - (Aside.) What shall Cordelia speak? Love and be silent. Lear - Of all these bounds, even from this line to this, / With shadowy forests and with champaigns riched, / With plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads, / We make thee lady. To thine and Albany’s issues / Be this perpetual. What says our second daughter, / Our dearest Regan, wife of Cornwall? Regan - I am made of that same mettle as my sister, / And prize me at her worth. In my true heart / I find she names my very deed of love; / Only she comes too short: that I profess / Myself an enemy to all other joys / Which the most precious square of sense professes, / And find I am alone felicitate / In your dear highness’ love.

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Cordelia - (Aside.) Then poor Cordelia. / And yet not so, since I am sure my love’s / More ponderous than my tongue. Lear - To thee and thine hereditary ever / Remain this ample third of our fair kingdom; / No less in space, validity, and pleasure / Than that conferred on Goneril. . .

There are many aspects worth being noticed in this passage. The first one has to do

with style: also when he addresses his daughters, Lear never does it in a personal way. He is

always rhetorical, for he is the King, and he does not address just one person - when he

speaks, he is to be listened by all his subjects. As for the rich and flowery manner his

daughters Goneril and Regan speak, it was very usual for the literary critics of the last two

centuries or so to take it as a sign of their adorned hypocrisy, since they speak in a quite

different way in the other scenes that follow. It could actually be so, but this is just one

among many other possibilities of interpreting the style they are using in their speeches to the

King. It is natural that the reader will attribute one or another motivation to a character’s

actions and speeches - especially when he is reading drama - , but one would find it useful

to remember Walter Benjamin’s lesson about the fictional narrative: the storyteller will do

well enough if he does not define the intention behind a character’s action, but instead, leaves

its motivational possibilities quite open, so that different readers in different times and

societies will have the possibility of ascribing different motivations. Benjamin believes that

narratives which do not attribute one definite psychological motivation to an action performed

by a character stand a better chance of survival along the time, and I agree with him.5 6 I

believe King Lear is one of such cases, and so, hypocrisy is just one possibility among others

for Regan and Goneril’s stylish speeches (and, in fact, a rather poor one). This play allows us

not to close the possibilities for the characters and situations in it, and one of the keys for

achieving this quality is its constant changes of style.

I believe the reason their speeches are built this way lies not in any psychological

motivation, but instead, in the situation and atmosphere in that part of the scene. (This does

not mean at all that the characters act devoid of any psychological motivation. However, we

would better focus on the form, since it allows many interpretational possibilities for the

characters’ actions, which is one of the reasons this text has been captivating the public’s

attention both on page and on stage, and intriguing it for such a long time.)

This scene of Lear and his children, with all its grandiose promises and language, and

presenting the situation of a father-king who establishes a competition between the three

daughters-princesses, reminds us of the fairy-tales. As I said in Chapter 1 (1.2), in the early

modern times the English public was still predominately illiterate, and thus raised in an aural

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popular culture, which caused them to be completely familiar to those folk narratives.7

Goneril and Regan find themselves in such a situation where, in a quite literal way, “form is

content”. Thus, they could not formulate their utterances in a different manner - at least not

without contradicting the spectator or reader’s horizon of expectations. And, as I just said

above and will demonstrate in the following pages, Shakespeare’s method in the construction

of this play is one of first raising the audience’s expectations according to their familiarity

with the theatrical and narrative genres the play dialogues with, and after this is done,

contradicting these same expectations.

The last formal observation about the passage above concerns Cordelia. Even if we do

not take into consideration her situation, her actions and her objectives, there is a formal

device in her initial lines which differentiates her from her sisters right at the first moment:

she speaks in the third person. This little artifice practically denotes that, despite the fact that

she is the youngest daughter - and the only single one - , she attributes herself a good amount

of importance, possibly because she somehow knows she is her father’s favourite. (In her

second speech she shifts to the first person in order to obtain the audience’s empathy;

however, these lines also start in the third person.) The form already guides the audience’s

horizon of expectations; a spectator or reader who is not familiar with the play - and, for this

reason, does not know that Goneril and Regan are the villains - will know that Cordelia is

supposed to be the heroine due to these two facts: she talks about inner content as opposed to

mundane outwardly demonstrations (in a rather Christian way), and, mainly, she talks like a

very important person, maybe a would-be queen. (And, of course, there is the aspect of

Cordelia being the third, i.e., the last one to speak. Thus, accordingly to the narrative

conventions, the audience will expect that the last daughter to speak will differentiate from the

two former ones.)

Such a formal device allows Shakespeare to be more subtle in the construction of this

scene - and of the play as a whole - than a less talented author would be. We have a

construction which unfolds little by little who is the hero and who is the villain, and so, a

staging of the play does not need to present Goneril and Regan right away as scolds. Their

evil aspect might evolve in a gradation, and thus, it will probably provide a more interesting

spectacle if these two characters are introduced in the beginning as quite normal women who

might even have a cause of theirs. Such subtlety also applies to Cordelia. It is quite usual in

the history of King Lear’s stagings to present the youngest daughter in a very idealized light,

as some all-pathos, Christ-like silent sufferer.8 What one usually forgets is that Cordelia is

actually a strong and determined character: she even dares to confront Lear in this scene and,

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later in the play, she becomes the commander of the French invasion. If this is taken into

account when composing the actress’s interpretation, another possibility for the asides is to

utter them in a more confident, King’s-favourite-daughter way. In Cordelia’s asides it is also

possible to perceive the arrogance and conceit of someone who believes herself to be superior

to Goneril and Regan - someone who is so sure her father values her better than her sisters,

that she does not need to make the slightest effort in order to please him, as Goneril and

Regan strive so hard to.

So, Cordelia is a person of elevate feelings, and at the same time she is arrogant. As

for Goneril and Regan, there are hints of their insincerity, while at the same time they can be

shown as people who have a real problem - they are daughters who have a hard time trying

to get from their father at least some of the attention he dedicates to their insolent younger

sister.

This information can do a lot more than only provide subtlety and nuance. Due to the

way he disposes such information in the scene, Shakespeare allows the spectator the

possibility of evaluating the characters in a more critical light. Thus, a staging could provide

that Cordelia’s asides are presented in such a way as to show the older sisters’ vileness and, at

the same time, how conceited Cordelia is. Actually, this more detached examining of the

situation around the characters can go much farther: it might enable us to have a glimpse on

the social conditions which generate the conflict presented before us. Of course we, either as

readers or as spectators, do not formulate a sociological discourse to explain what is

happening there - one of the main characteristics of art is that its articulation of symbols

operate on a sensitive-intuitive level. Still, also on this level we are able to grasp some

aspects which are more political, and will try one way or another to articulate them with our

knowledge of the world. I am stating this in relation to Cordelia, since her blending of

arrogance and dignified acts definitely conveys social information. We feel she is indeed

noble - and let us keep this word in mind.

As Poulantzas has elaborated on Engels’ scheme of the development of societies along

History, each society bears some remnant focuses of the preceding ones, that is, these ones

leave traces.9 I am saying this because of the word above: noble. Let us open the

Penguin/Longman pocket English dictionary and take a look at two of the more common

definitions that come to our mind:

- having or showing a magnanimous character or high ideals;

- a person of noble rank or birth.

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The critical methodology employed in this thesis absolutely does not rely on

philological or etymological studies. Nevertheless, a dictionary is an excellent resource not

only to know the current meanings a certain word can have, but also - and this has to do with

the Marxist approach I am employing - to examine the ideological aspects it might convey.

These two current definitions for the word noble point to the fact that, in spite of the clear

hegemony the bourgeoisie has established in the capitalistic Western societies, the nobility

was somehow still able to hold its grip on the way it wanted to be represented: magnanimous,

dignified, imposing, showing high ideals (all of them are dictionary definitions).

For this reason, Cordelia’s blending of arrogance and dignity is not really an accident.

Just like Lear and Kent - who are still going to be more closely studied -, she is behaving

exactly like a noble is expected to do, if she is to be found deserving of her rank. As for

Goneril and Regan, they are not typical members of the nobility, but we will come back to

this subject in a later moment.

Let us return to the scene in the exact moment where it was interrupted. Lear has just

finished addressing Goneril and Regan, and now comes what the King expected to be the

apex of his show, when he addresses Cordelia (I.1.81-118),

Lear - . . . Now our joy, / Although our last and least, to whose young love / The vines of France and milk of Burgundy / Strive to be interested: what can you say to draw / A third more opulent than your sisters? Speak. Cordelia - Nothing, my lord. Lear - Nothing? Cordelia - Nothing. Lear - Nothing will come of nothing; speak again. Cordelia - Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth. I love your Majesty / According to my bond, no more nor less. Lear - How, how, Cordelia? Mend your speech a little / Lest you may mar your fortunes. Cordelia - Good my lord, / You have begot me, bred me, loved me. I / Return those duties back as are right fit; / Obey you, love you, and most honour you. / Why have my sisters husbands, if they say / They love you all? Happily when I shall wed / That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry / Half my love with him, half my care and duty. / Sure I shall never marry like my sisters. Lear - But goes thy heart with this? Cordelia - Aye, my good lord. Lear - So young and so untender? Cordelia - So young, my lord, and true. Lear - Let it be so. Thy truth then be thy dower, / For by the sacred radiance of the sun, / The mysteries of Hecat, and the night, / By all the operation of the orbs, / From whom we do exist and cease to be, / Here I disclaim all my paternal care, / Propinquity and property of blood, / And as a stranger to my heart and me / Hold thee from this for ever. The barbarous Scythian, / Or he that makes his generation messes / To gorge

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his appetite, shall to my bosom / Be as well neighboured, pitied and relieved / As thou, my sometime daughter.

We can easily observe that, when talking to Cordelia, Lear switches the usual

rhetorical tone to a more personal one. Let us now try to understand what is going on in a

more technical way, by examining the way Lear uses the pronouns ‘thou’ and ‘you’ when

dealing with his daughters. David Crystal has presented this matter in a very clear way, and so

I am going to quote him,

Social and attitudinal differences between people are so important that they affect some of the language’s most frequently used forms, notably the pronouns thou and you. In Old English, thou was singular and you was plural. But during the thirteenth century, you began to be used as a polite form of the singular - probably because people copied the French manner of talking, where vous was used in that way. English then became like French, which has tu and vous both possible for singulars. The usual thing was for you to be used by inferiors to superiors - such as children to parents, or servants to masters; and thou to be used in return. But people would also use thou when they wanted special intimacy, such as when addressing God; and thou was also normal when the lower classes talked to each other. The upper classes used you to each other, as a rule, even when they were closely related. So when someone changes from thou to you (or vice versa) in a conversation, it must mean something. The change will convey a different emotion or mood. The new meaning could be virtually anything - affection, anger, distance, sarcasm, playfulness. To say thou to someone could be an insult . . . The way characters switch from one pronoun to the other therefore acts as a barometer of their evolving attitudes and relationships. We find an important illustration in the opening scene of King Lear, where the king sets about dividing his kingdom among his daughters. We would expect Lear to use thou to them, and they to use you in return, which is how the interaction begins . . . But when Lear turns to his favourite daughter, he uses you . . . Plainly, if thou is for ‘ordinary’ daughters, you is being used here as a special marker of affection. But when Cordelia does not reply in the way he was expecting, Lear abruptly changes back (to thou) . . . Now the thou forms are not being used as a marker of fatherly affection, but of anger.10

This explanation about the use of the ‘thou’ and ‘you’ forms in this part of the scene

explains the first change in the way Lear treats Cordelia. According to this thinking, when

Lear says, “But goes thy heart with this?”, we have a change. However, we are still operating

on an individual level, and the scene actually goes far beyond that. To understand what I

mean, let us examine Lear’s last speech in the excerpt above. For clarity’s sake, I am going to

quote it again, this time separately,

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Lear - Let it be so. Thy truth then be thy dower, / For by the sacred radiance of the sun, / The mysteries of Hecat, and the night, / By all the operation of the orbs, / From whom we do exist and cease to be, / Here I disclaim all my paternal care, / Propinquity and property of blood, / And as a stranger to my heart and me / Hold thee from this for ever. The barbarous Scythian, / Or he that makes his generation messes / To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom / Be as well neighboured, pitied and relieved / As thou, my sometime daughter.

This speech of Lear is crucial to the scene. In the preceding moments he demonstrated

for quite a long time the great affection he has for Cordelia. Now, this thunderous expletive

comes just too unexpectedly. As a consequence, one cannot help feeling shocked.

Let us see what effect the construction of this scene might operate on the spectator or

the reader. It is true that Lear seems tyrannical right from the beginning, but even though,

when one is reading the dialogue he has with Cordelia, one cannot help feeling some sort of

compassion for that all-loving father who is mistreated by his conceited, apparently spoiled

youngest daughter. And all of a sudden, the situation changes completely, and Lear becomes

an unjust, fear-inspiring Titan, reminding us of the cannibalistic Saturn in Goya’s series of

Black Paintings. And we, who three seconds ago were criticizing Cordelia’s attitude,

suddenly feel all too sorry for her, and are now criticizing Lear’s “exaggerated” reaction.

Here we have the first example of the effect Shakespeare achieves in this play, of

changing from one moment to the other - and just all the time -, our judgment and feelings

towards the characters and situations. As a good number of critics has put it for such a long

time, we are dragged into a maelstrom of strong, violent emotions, and we never know what is

going to happen next. The consequence is that our evaluation of the situations presented is

unstable, and this causes us, as R. A. Foakes has so well and importantly expressed it, to live

in an eternal present when reading the play.11

The juxtaposition of so contradictory actions and situations, with no real gradation

between them, causes yet another effect: we get critical of the characters and, in this case,

especially of Lear. We end up not believing a hundred percent in what he says, either in one

situation or the other, since they contradict each other. This does not mean that we are not

emotionally engaged - we never get neutral towards the characters and situations.

Nevertheless, these abrupt changes are so strange that we tend to evaluate what happens in the

play in a more critical light - we are aware that all through the play we are treading some

quite unstable soil, and must take the characters’ lines with a grain of salt. According to Kent

Cartwright’s fine terminology for this dynamics (the alternation of engagement and

detachment), we engage in the action, and thus experience the pathos. At the same time, we

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are detached, that is, we, from outside the scene, observe and evaluate - just like scientists

before a puzzling phenomenon.

Thus, Lear’s sudden change in the excerpt above should not be treated as some mere

capriciousness of the King. Instead, this shows a structuring principle for this work, which

Shakespeare keeps throughout the whole play, even if it changes so much that we happen to

think there is no structuring at all. Consequently, we will do better if we leave the easy realm

of psychologization, and instead, observe that this compositional resource is not

psychologizing at all. In many of Shakespeare’s plays, and in this one in particular,

characters who go from one state to the other do not have to undergo a many-phase gradation.

They are allowed to - even must - change all of a sudden. Such shading - which came to

be a requirement of later psychological realism - is not useful here. The aesthetics of King

Lear asks for abrupt changes, which actually enable the story to proceed more speedily,

without stopping at moments of lesser interest. Like a fairy-tale or any other narrative of

popular origin, the F version of King Lear features only the essential elements of a story. So,

the spectator or the reader does not have to deal with irrelevant details. He will also not be

bugged with explanatory accretions - and this will allow him to arrive by himself to

whatever conclusions.12 13 14 As a consequence, he will be more capable of concentrating on

the story’s most important elements. This does not have to do only with his aesthetic fruition,

and I will have to explain this in better detail.

The most remarkable achievement of this compositional device is its capability of

widening the audience’s scope in such a way that one will also have a political perception

about the story being told. It generates an effect of detachment in such a way that we move

from the personal-familial and mythical scopes to a wider one which concerns the questions

of state. It reminds us that what we are watching is a collective drama, precisely because the

scene presents in a sequence a familial situation, and then a situation concerning the state.

The familial-mythical scope catches our attention and causes our empathy in a way that would

probably not be possible, had the author presented the matters of state in a purer way (as in so

many of the histories). This more collective scope is the real focus of King Lear. As flies

attracted to sugar, we get interested in the play due to these melodramatic stories that taste of

familial-mythical matter. However - and in a masterful way -, after our attention is caught,

Shakespeare is able to direct our attention to the societal drama. (I must make it clear that this

last paragraph refers to the manner I believe the contemporary public relates to the play. In

the Elizabethan and Jacobean times there was not a separation of family and state matters.

Thus, Shakespeare’s audience actually experienced those as being parts of a whole, just as the

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author did when he composed his works. The strict separation of private and public matters is

a much later development in the western societies - it is a feature of our lives, and since we

act and think according to such a frame, which is different from the one of Shakespeare’s

times, our perception of the author’s works will also be different.)

We are now moving closer to Brecht’s V-effekt. As we saw in Chapter 2 (2.5), the V-

effekt is a concept similar to that of estrangement - that is, presenting an unfamiliar look

upon the situations and characters -, and it also bears some analogy to Cartwright’s

detachment, but there is a political slant to it: by detaching ourselves from what happens in

the scene, we also have the possibility of perceiving that the facts presented necessarily

happen within definite historical circumstances, and consequently, we can apply this

perception to our own life in our present society. Strangely enough, Shakespeare’s

anachronisms, especially in King Lear - a play set in the eighth century B.C., featuring a

clash between medieval-feudal forces and Renaissance-bourgeois ones - are of great help in

providing this political critical perception.

What this V-effekt does is, it takes us from the personal-familial confine to a wider

political surrounding - in King Lear, that one concerning the matters of state and societal

organization, and more specifically, concerning the basis upon which the power of the king

rests. Let us see more specifically how this happens in this scene.

First, we need to look at Lear’s first lines, and see in which way their content differs

from what is uttered by his daughters. We will perceive that all three daughters’ lines sound

absolutely fairy-tale-like. (This is no put-down at all. There is a magic to the three women’s

lines which is rarely to be seen, and takes us back to the long-forgotten times when we were

nannied by such stories.) The content of Lear’s initial lines, however, is a blend of such fairy-

tale stuff with a more evidently political one. He also talks about matters of state: his coming

retirement, a division that intends to prevent future strife, and defining who will marry his

youngest daughter.15 Being Cordelia unmarried and the youngest daughter, she is not really a

great candidate for inheriting even a third part of the King’s power - Goneril and Regan, for

their turn, are already and respectively married to the dukes of Albany and Cornwall, and, for

this reason, are indeed more powerful at the moment of the imminent division. Nevertheless,

Cordelia has as candidates for her hand, not only the duke of Burgundy, but also a king - and

the King of France himself, at that! This shows not only Lear’s favouritism even before he

addresses Cordelia (needless to say, an unarranged marriage would be inconceivable in that

context); it also shows that she is bound for becoming the most powerful heir. And, of course,

this might later on bring her sisters some quite disagreeable - and very political -

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consequences. So, there is a cause to Goneril and Regan that goes beyond the already-

mentioned family problems.

As readers or spectators, we are not likely to get immediately aware that we are

witnessing a political confrontation. One of the reasons for this is that Lear’s initial speech,

even being explicitly political, has got many of the magical fairy-tale elements to it. And the

daughters’ lines which follow it, as well as Lear’s next lines, are sheer “fairy-tale-ical”. The

consequence is that the social content does not get outright explicit - it will reach the

spectator in a less direct way, and I believe this is to the play’s advantage. The way it is built,

King Lear makes it possible for the spectator and the reader to elaborate it first on the

intuitive-sensitive level, and later on, on the rational level.

Since a lot of not-explicitly-political dialogue follows Lear’s initial lines, we might

first have the feeling that this scene is not political, and instead, it rather concerns the familial

or mythical scope. But we are brought back to politics, and this time in a very explicit way,

when we read or listen to Lear’s imprecation by the end of this short passage (in I.1.106-11).

Of course that is not just the harangue of an angry father. In fact, it is some plain matter of

state: the favourite heir of the King, the daughter who the King possibly wanted to become

the most powerful one, is being expelled from the kingdom, and thus, power will concentrate

on the hands of the two other daughters. This is sheer politics and is inescapable to the

audience.

To sum up: the contradictory actions and situations, as well as the constant changes of

style (an element that will be further studied), make our empathy with any of the characters

problematic. It is not that we do not feel empathy. We do, and sometimes in a very plaintive

way, but this empathy is not able to last - the same character towards which this feeling is

directed, will act in the next moment in such a way that demands our critical judgment. This

prevents us from establishing a permanent alignment to any character (or, at least, to most of

them). In a way or another, we are always criticizing them.

In the last two paragraphs, I tried to show in a technical way the most important

artistic achievement of the estrangement King Lear achieves, which is in certain moments

analogous to Brecht’s V-effekt: by making us detach from the characters - instead of being

always connected to them -, this structuring of the scene establishes the possibility of passing

from the familial-mythical realm to the political one. King Lear reminds us all the time that

we are witnessing the drama of an entire society, and not just of a group of persons.

The passage we have just examined concentrates in a very clear way a movement

which is to be seen throughout all the play; a movement that takes us from the familial-

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mythical scope to the sociopolitical one, which, in my point of view, is the main focus in King

Lear. (As a Brazilian reader, I feel this seems to be the problem with Shakespeare’s histories:

they lack such a movement. Since they concern in a very explicit way the lives of the kings

of England - that is, medieval politics in a pure way -, and usually do not offer other

elements of interest besides that, they tend to seem pretty unattractive and dull to a non-

English public, especially the Brazilian one. On the other hand, the tragedies, even if they

also deal with politics, offer plenty of personal-mythical elements which catch our attention.

It is probably for this reason that outside of England they are far more popular than the

histories.)

One last word about this passage before going further into I.1: we have just seen that,

according to the structure of the excerpt we have analyzed, all three daughters’ speeches

sound fairy-tale like. It is actually Lear who provides the spectator the historical-political

overtones. In spite of this, there is more to their speeches and behaviour than just individual

content. We should not limit ourselves to easy psychological-moralizing conclusions (for

instance, Goneril and Regan’s falseness versus Cordelia’s pureness; or, the oppression of

Goneril and Regan due to Lear’s favouritism). Instead, we will do better if we study the

political implications in the three daughters’ difference of behaviour. This will be done later

on, for now we must abandon the three sisters for a while, and look at other characters -

Kent, for instance.

We are now going to delve with the scene’s next moment, when Kent tries to intercede

for Cordelia (I.1.119-85). For purposes both of methodology and aesthetic fruition, I will first

reproduce the whole passage, and right after we will analyze the bits of dialogue that are more

relevant for this study. So, first, the passage (I.1.138-85),

Kent - Good, my liege. Lear - Peace, Kent! / Come not between the dragon and his wrath. / I loved her most, and thought to set my rest / On her kind nursery. (To Cordelia.) Hence, and avoid my / sight! / So be my grave my peace as here I give / Her father’s heart from her. Call France. Who stirs? / Call Burgundy. Cornwall and Albany, / With my two daughters’ dowers digest the third. / Let pride, which she calls plainness, marry her. / I do invest you jointly with my power, / Pre-eminence, and all the large effects / That troop with majesty. Ourself by monthly course, / With reservation of an hundred knights / By you to be sustained, shall our abode / Make with you by due turn. Only we shall retain / The name and all th’addition to a king: / The sway, revenue, execution of the rest, / Beloved sons, be yours; which to confirm, / This coronet part between you. Kent - Royal Lear, / Whom I have ever honoured as my king, / Loved as my father, as my master followed, / As my great patron thought on in my prayers.

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Lear - The bow is bent and drawn; make from the shaft. Kent - Let it fall rather, though the fork invade / The region of my heart. Be Kent unmannerly / When Lear is mad. What would’st thou do, old man? / Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak / When power to flattery bows? To plainness honour’s bound / When majesty falls to folly. Reserve thy state, / And in thy best consideration check / This hideous rashness. Answer my life my judgment: / Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least, / Nor are those empty-hearted whose low sounds / Reverb no hollowness. Lear - Kent, on thy life, no more! Kent - My life I never held but as a pawn / To wage against thine enemies; ne’re fear to lose it, / Thy safety being motive. Lear - Out of my sight! Kent - See better, Lear, and let me still remain / The true blank of thine eye. Lear - Now by Apollo - Kent - Now by Apollo, King, thou swear’st thy gods in vain. Lear - O vassal! Miscreant! Albany and Cornwall - Dear sir, forbear. Kent - Kill thy physician, and thy fee bestow / Upon the foul disease. Revoke thy gift / Or whilst I can vent clamour from my throat, / I’ll tell thee thou dost evil. Lear - Hear me, recreant; on thine allegiance hear me! / That thou hast sought to make us break our vows, / Which we durst never yet, and with strained pride / To come betwixt our sentences and our power, / Which nor our nature nor our place can bear, / Our potency made good, take thy reward: / Five days we do allot thee for provision / To shield thee from disasters of the world, / And on the sixth to turn thy hated back / Upon our kingdom. If on the tenth day following / Thy banished trunk be found in our dominions, / The moment is thy death. Away! By Jupiter, / This shall not be revoked. Kent - Fare thee well, King. Sith thus thou wilt appear, / Freedom lives hence, and banishment is here. / (To Cordelia) The gods to their dear shelter take thee, maid, / That justly think’st, and hast most rightly said. / (To Goneril and Regan) And your large speeches may your deeds approve, / That good effects may spring from words of love. / Thus Kent, O princes, bids you all adieu; / He’ll shape his old course in a country new. (Exit.)

And now, for the details. Enter Kent,

Kent - Good, my liege.

Kent’s very first line is an example of Shakespeare’s talent for conveying information

right within the action in a precise and agile way. When the earl pleads on Cordelia’s behalf,

we already get to know from these three words his relationship to Lear, who reacts,

Lear - Peace, Kent! / Come not between the dragon and his wrath. / I loved her most, and thought to set my rest / On her kind nursery. (To Cordelia.) Hence, and avoid my / sight! / So be my grave my peace as

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here I give / Her father’s heart from her. Call France. Who stirs? / Call Burgundy. Cornwall and Albany, / With my two daughters’ dowers digest the third. / Let pride, which she calls plainness, marry her. / I do invest you jointly with my power, / Pre-eminence, and all the large effects / That troop with majesty. Ourself by monthly course, / With reservation of an hundred knights / By you to be sustained, shall our abode / Make with you by due turn. Only we shall retain / The name and all th’addition to a king: / The sway, revenue, execution of the rest, / Beloved sons, be yours; which to confirm, / This coronet part between you.

Lots of action in those few lines! Lear switches from his usual rhetorical royal style to

a very personal tone (in a couple of sentences), and back: he retorts Kent; then bemoans, as if

for himself (that is, not in royal style); shouts at Cordelia (it even looks she is being expelled

like some stray dog); one more time bemoans, but this time invested of his King persona

(i.e., in a rhetorical way); demands from whoever (this means, the public, everybody) to get

France and Burgundy to the room; and finally, details his intentions to Cornwall and Albany,

who are his real heirs (Goneril and Regan being women, they are not supposed to hold any

power other than symbolical). Now that is some dizzying dynamics: within a few seconds,

we leap from one moment to another completely different. We are never allowed whatever

little time to get used to a new piece of information; it is useless trying to guess where an

action will lead to, because it will be immediately substituted by something new.

This constant interruption of the action (even if it will be resumed in a further

moment) is another device that generates detachment. I am not talking here of such a

detachment that enables the spectator to have a politically critical perception of the facts -

such as in Brecht’s V-effekt -, but one of a more restricted scope. This is an emotional

detachment (such as the one described by Kent Cartwright) which operates according to the

following dynamics: whenever we think we are getting used to a situation and believe we can

make predictions about what is going to happen next; whenever we are taken by a certain

emotion, which we believe is going to last, something comes which interrupts the action and

gives the scene an unexpected turn - and we as spectators or readers are then obliged to start

wholly anew.

Such constant interruptions lead in some moments to an extreme fragmentation of the

action which, alongside with the multiplicity of points of view existing in the play, is probably

responsible for the perception that the Romantic criticism had of King Lear,: that of an

ungraspable work of art, immersed in such a fantasticality which would oblige us only to

admire the play, for we would never be able to properly analyze it.

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We have seen that Lear has directed a speech towards Albany and Cornwall (in fact,

towards the world, according to his characteristic imperial style) in which he says that, in spite

of his abdication from the throne, he “shall retain / The name and all th’addition to a king” .

And, at this moment, Kent again interposes,

Kent - Royal Lear, / Whom I have ever honoured as my king, / Loved as my father, as my master followed, / As my great patron thought on in my prayers.

The first thing to notice is that, as opposed to his first exchange with Gloucester, Kent

now speaks in blank verse. This has to do with the exigencies of the scene. Even if a

nobleman is always supposed to be a nobleman, Kent’s first dialogue (on Edmund’s bastardy)

did not follow the aristocratic rules of decorum, let alone talking about an ‘elevate’ subject.

According to these same rules, lowly matters require a lowly form - that is, plain and

common prose in the beginning of the scene. This is not the case here - we have important,

indeed, noble matters going on!

This fact makes it opportune to state here a compositional quality, not only of

Shakespeare, but of the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as a whole. As I said earlier,

psychological realism was not a preoccupation of such playwrights, and thus, there was not an

exigency that a character be coherent throughout the whole play. The formal unit considered

was the scene - each scene was to be treated as a whole play; not as just some part of a

bigger mechanism, and thus, limited to generating a specific effect on the whole. If each

scene was to have a life of its own, that is, if it was to be treated as an independent small play,

considerations of style (for instance) would constantly change, according to the exigencies of

the scene.16 (And this was one element of the Elizabethan theatre which inspired Brecht’s

work.) The peculiarity of King Lear is that these changes of style happen not just from scene

to scene, but within the same scene, and at a sometimes dizzying speed.

As for another stylistic consideration about Kent’s lines, let us keep in mind the little

excerpt above, and add to it the next lines that we are going to see (I.1.141-152),

Lear - The bow is bent and drawn; make from the shaft. Kent - Let it fall rather, though the fork invade / The region of my heart. Be Kent unmannerly / When Lear is mad. What would’st thou do, old man? / Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak / When power to flattery bows? To plainness honour’s bound / When majesty falls to folly. Reserve thy state, / And in thy best consideration check / This hideous rashness. Answer my life my judgment: / Thy youngest daughter does not

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love thee least, / Nor are those empty-hearted whose low sounds / Reverb no hollowness.

Let us see, then, “Royal Lear, / Whom I have ever honoured as my king, / Loved as

my father, as my master followed, / As my great patron thought on in my prayers”. If we try

to identify the style that pervades Kent’s lines, we are getting to that heroic one of the

chivalric romances, and this is not accidental. In these first lines, we have more than Kent’s

allegiance to Lear. We are dealing with something else than just the personal trait of a vassal

who loves his King - we have an outright assumed spokesman for the values of feudalism,

maybe the most accomplished one in this play. As I will try to show, Kent is actually more

of a function than of a character properly speaking.

I am not denying one might find a personal aspect to these lines, such as a man who is

brave, good-hearted, sincere, disinterested - noble, indeed. Especially when King Lear gets

a theatrical production, both actor and director must work on these personal aspects of the

character, in order that he has an organic life in the scene. Nevertheless, I still maintain that

Kent - however likable he might be due to his goodness - bears more of a discursive-

ideological function in this work than that of a character properly speaking.

I will pick three more sentences of Kent’s speech above in order to base this idea: “Let

it fall rather, though the fork invade / The region of my heart. Be Kent unmannerly / When

Lear is mad”, plus, “To plainness honour’s bound / When majesty falls to folly” , plus,

“Answer my life my judgment: / Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least, / Nor are

those empty-hearted whose low sounds / Reverb no hollowness”. One could feel tempted to

say there is some irreverence in these lines. A vassal dares to face his King, and tell him the

error he is incurring into. To make matters worse, Kent even applies the ‘thou’ treatment to

his Lord and King! And not just that, he calls him – plainly and bluntly – ‘old man’, “What

would’st thou do, old man? / Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak / When power

to flattery bows?”

What is actually happening, though, is something quite other, but we will need to see

the rest of this dialogue in order to understand this (I.1.152-85),

Lear - Kent, on thy life, no more! Kent - My life I never held but as a pawn / To wage against thine enemies; ne’re fear to lose it, / Thy safety being motive. Lear - Out of my sight! Kent - See better, Lear, and let me still remain / The true blank of thine eye. Lear - Now by Apollo -

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Kent - Now by Apollo, King, thou swear’st thy gods in vain. Lear - O vassal! Miscreant! Albany and Cornwall - Dear sir, forbear. 17 Kent - Kill thy physician, and thy fee bestow / Upon the foul disease. Revoke thy gift / Or whilst I can vent clamour from my throat, / I’ll tell thee thou dost evil. Lear - Hear me, recreant; on thine allegiance hear me! / That thou hast sought to make us break our vows, / Which we durst never yet, and with strained pride / To come betwixt our sentences and our power, / Which nor our nature nor our place can bear, / Our potency made good, take thy reward: / Five days we do allot thee for provision / To shield thee from disasters of the world, / And on the sixth to turn thy hated back / Upon our kingdom. If on the tenth day following / Thy banished trunk be found in our dominions, / The moment is thy death. Away! By Jupiter, / This shall not be revoked. Kent - Fare thee well, King. Sith thus thou wilt appear, / Freedom lives hence, and banishment is here. / (To Cordelia) The gods to their dear shelter take thee, maid, / That justly think’st, and hast most rightly said. / (To Goneril and Regan) And your large speeches may your deeds approve, / That good effects may spring from words of love. / Thus Kent, O princes, bids you all adieu; / He’ll shape his old course in a country new. (Exit.)

We see that irreverence is not really the case if we take into account lines I.1.152-4,

“My life I never held but as a pawn / To wage against thine enemies; ne’re fear to lose it, /

Thy safety being motive.” Thus, lack of respect for Lear does not seem to be an attribute of

Kent. And here we arrive at the conclusion that his function in the play is that of a staunch

defender of the ideological principles of feudalism against any deviations that might be

proposed by anybody - Lear included. Kent is loyal to Lear not only due to personal bonds,

but mainly because this character is a true believer of the feudal values, “See better, Lear,

and let me still remain / The true blank of thine eye.”

If the King himself will deviate from such values, Kent – as the ideological guardian

he actually is – will restate them at any rate. Such values precede the King, whoever he is and

however beloved he is, “Be Kent unmannerly / When Lear is mad”; “To plainness honour’s

bound / When majesty falls to folly”. In the case of a conflict between Lear and medieval

ideology, Kent will definitely stick to the last one.

The easiest way to perceive this defence of the feudal nobility’s values is the way Kent

expresses his adherence to this class’s code of honour. Also to be noticed is this remnant

trace of the ancient Heroic Age: a man’s conduct should be given literal expression through

his actions. That is, there should be a thorough continuity between what is said and what is

done, with no space allowed for whatever dissonances or ulterior motives. As for some

utterances where Kent expresses this value (for instance: “Thy youngest daughter does not

love thee least, / Nor are those empty-hearted whose low sounds / Reverb no hollowness” ;

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“What would’st thou do, old man? / Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak / When

power to flattery bows?” ; or when he addresses Goneril and Regan: “And your large

speeches may your deeds approve . . .” , and others), the best we should do is not just

moralize and ascribe it to Kent’s seemingly goody-goody nature. Instead, we should try to

understand the social and political movement associated with it.

By this, I do not mean Kent is not good-hearted. He is, and this is what usually causes

us some sort of relief every moment he enters - until he starts getting boring, for that never-

changing goodness ends up being incredibly predictable, and thus, monotonous. The point is:

if our feelings towards Kent move from some initial admiration up to a sense that his

repetitiveness gets to be somewhat ridiculous, this does not occur due to some shoddy

characterization work that so happened, because perhaps the Bard was not really inspired the

day he conceived this specific character. By this movement which gets more and more

predictable, we - the theatre audience, or the readers - have a glimpse of the English feudal

nobility’s lack of capability for changing according to the new social circumstances that were

entering the scene in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. These feudal

lords would always present the same stock responses to the new facts which were happening

around them. For this reason, they would end up being obsolete.

So many unpredictable things happen to so many characters along the play (and

especially in the end), but good ol’ Kent keeps always the same. Even the lines he utters

along the play show this characteristic: they are lively and interesting in the first two scenes

he appears but, exactly as the character himself never changes, also his lines sound “trite and

wooden”, as a theatre critic once has so nicely put it. It is as if we were witnessing the effect

of a ‘time machine’: Kent sounds as if he were brought into the scene from an earlier age as

that of the other characters, and this impression is quite accurate. His speech sounds indeed

more archaic and less spontaneous than that of so many other characters, and this has to be so.

His “chivalry dialect” is the verbal expression of a part of the English nobility that

could not adapt to the new times of the emergent capitalism, as opposed to another faction of

the same class which - at least in England - was able to forge alliances with the thriving

bourgeoisie. (In a few moments we are going to see in more detail who could be the aesthetic

equivalent in King Lear for this more modern and flexible group within the English nobility.)

So Kent is doomed to disappear into obsolescence, which is actually the way he ends

in the play. He prepares all along the play for a glorious comeback, but can do nothing better

in the last scene than be the pathos-soaked remainder of some glorious times (at least for a

definite social class) which are never to be back. He will not even be allowed to die in the

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scene. Due to his class’s lack of importance in the play’s final moments, when the world has

all changed, he will have to pass away quietly and out of the stage.

So, after Kent exits, we have Lear facing the two suitors for Cordelia’s hand, France

and Burgundy. I am going to present their introductory moments in two bits, for I think this

should favour a contrastive approach for the two characters. Let us then first see the dialogue

between Lear and the duke of Burgundy (I.1.187-206),

Lear - My lord of Burgundy. . . What in the least / Will you require in present dower with her, / Or cease your quest of love? Burgundy - Most royal Majesty, / I crave no more than hath your highness offered, / Nor will you tender less. Lear - Right noble Burgundy, / When she was dear to us we did hold her so; / But now her price is fallen. Sir, there she stands. / If aught within that little seeming substance, / Or all of it, with our displeasure pieced / And nothing more, may fitly like your grace, / She’s there, and she is yours. Burgundy - I know no answer. Lear - Will you with those infirmities she owes, / Unfriended, new-adopted to our hate, / Dowered with our curse, and strangered with our oath, / Take her or leave her? Burgundy - Pardon me, royal sir; / Election makes not up in such conditions. Lear - Then leave her, sir; for, by the power that made me, / I tell you all her wealth . . .

Now for the dialogue with the King of France (I.1.206-21),

Lear - . . . (To France) For you, great King, / I would not from your love make such a stray / To match you where I hate; therefore beseech you / T’avert your liking a more worthier way / Than on a wretch whom nature is ashamed / Almost t’acknowledge hers. France - This is most strange / That she whom even but now was your object / The argument of your praise, balm of your age, / The best, the dearest, should in this trice of time / Commit a thing so monstrous to dismantle / So many folds of favour. Sure her offence / Must be of such unnatural degree / That monsters it, or your fore-vouched affection / Fall into taint; which to believe of her / Must be a faith that reason without miracle / Should never plant in me.

When Lear deals with these two suitors, he is not looking for the best offer he can get

for Cordelia. Instead, he is doing what a fellow living in post-industrial capitalism like me

would call an “anti-advertisement” of his youngest daughter, devaluating Cordelia the most he

can. Starting the study of this moment by the most obvious aspect seems a good procedure.

Let us then go to the obvious: the difference of tone between France and Burgundy can be

grasped immediately. The King of France speaks in a most idealized manner, which would be

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quite proper either to the folk fairy-tale or to the medieval romance. He is all concerned about

inherent merit and worth. Whatever he has to say, whatever his previously conceived ideas

are, they will not change due to “minor” considerations such as richness, territory or political

power.

Burgundy, by contrast, is carefully evaluating, he is analyzing the situation in its

concrete aspects. He has established concrete goals in relation to marrying Cordelia and is

determined to obtain them - otherwise, he will not marry her. That is, he is negotiating. Of

course this fact does not turn Burgundy into a representative of the bourgeoisie. After all,

properties were definitely the main interest of the feudal lords. Those, as well as money, were

not invented by capitalism, and existed long before this socio-economic system came into

being - the accumulation of goods has been the focus of practically all ruling classes in the

different phases of History. What is new to the capitalistic organization of society is its focus

on the multiplication and mainly circulation of these same goods - that is, an ever-growing

productivity and exchange.

This means that Burgundy’s behaviour of carefully analyzing and evaluating the

suitability of marrying Cordelia to his economic goals is not something impossible to happen

to a nobleman. Just as Kent, Cordelia and France represent the ideological discourse of the

feudal nobility in its purest form, it might be appropriate to state again the obvious: ideology

does not represent the ruling class as it is, but as it perceives itself - as it would like to be

seen and represented. Thus, these last three characters are represented according to the

prescription of medieval literary rules for depicting the ruling class, while Burgundy is not,

even if he also is a feudal lord.

The consequence is that, while Burgundy’s negotiations need not be necessarily called

capitalistic, he still is shown in a different light as that of his class counterparts. He is not

embellished through the lenses of medieval ideology, and thus is shown as behaving in a very

pragmatic way. And since he is not shown in the same idealized manner as, for instance, the

King of France is, we will miss the grandeur of this later character. Amid the likes of Kent,

Cordelia and France, Burgundy will seem meager in comparison.

At this point it is important to state one more time that King Lear was first presented

for a Jacobean audience. What they would see on stage during this scene was two types of

nobility: one that was more similar to what they were used to, and another which was

presented as it “should be”. And here I must talk a little bit about this “should-be nobility” in

connection to the phenomenon of ideology. First of all, when relating the evolution of

representation and of aesthetic forms to the changes in the organization of a given society, we

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should better avoid getting too mechanical about it. Many of these forms and representations

subsist a long time after the disappearance of the socio-economic manner of organization they

were connected to (let us recall the example of the father-God-king figure mentioned in

Chapter 2 [2.4]).

The case of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods is not merely one of a long-lasting

remnant of a previous age. Regardless of how strong its effects might have been felt at that

time, capitalism in England was still being built - the Modern Age might have formally

started more than one century before King Lear was written, but life in England still presented

many aspects of the late Middle Ages - what we had then was a long-time cohabitation of

both medieval and Renaissance aspects concerning the people’s concrete life. Such a

situation was not restricted to the concrete factors of everyday life - there was also a

cohabitation of representations, and this in the theatre as well.

An important tendency in the English literary and historical studies talks about a

peaceful coexistence in those times of both the Renaissance and the Middle Ages,18 of

capitalism and feudalism - nevertheless, what happened there was actually a bitter clash

between two incompatible systems of economic organization and of thinking. In the later

history of England, such a situation was misunderstood, due to a tradition in that country of

de-emphasizing all manifestations of class struggle that occurred along the English history, so

as to present it in a rather consensual manner - which, of course, is fictional. Even if the

English have shown along their history a remarkable capability of accommodating such

conflicts, this “consensual” England remains fictive and is a relatively recent construction. In

early modern England there was an increasing awareness of the fact that different social

classes and groups had necessarily conflicting interests, and thus, politics was still perceived

as a battlefield. This perception is to be seen in the works of the Elizabethan and Jacobean

playwrights, Shakespeare among them - and King Lear is an excellent example of that.

A feudal lord concerned about merit and worth, and another one focused on concrete

interests - that is, a nobleman “as it should be”, and another one who goes about his

business. The King of France is not ready to yield an inch in his beliefs, while Burgundy is

very explicit about his quest for material benefits. Burgundy, in other words, seems a little

bit more like “real life”. Of course, this is not an artistic advantage in itself. Since art

approaches life in a symbolic language, it should not be concerned with providing a

naturalistic mimesis of what the public sees and lives - sometimes a symbolic or formal

organization can represent the conflicts of a given society in such a powerful way, which a

more realistic one would just not be able to do. Still, mimesis is an important resource of art,

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one which Shakespeare mastered very well, and which is used here to the advantage of

showing two approaches to power in a contrastive way. Burgundy’s one is clearer to an

audience of our times. I said above that his actions and speeches would not be impossible in

the medieval times; nevertheless, they seem more contemporary, since we live in an age

where everybody negotiates all the time, and not just the politicians. It just seems so . . .

“capitalistic”, indeed.

There is no doubt that the juxtaposition of these two characters places Burgundy in an

unfavourable light. Besides France’s beautiful speeches; besides the fact that we, either as

spectators or as readers, will probably side up with the one character that seems to act out of a

good heart, and not with the other one that is moved by some petty self-interest; besides the

fact that we all crave for unconditional love (France: “Love’s not love / When it is mingled

with regards that stands / Aloof from th’entire point” ; or still, “Gods, gods! ‘Tis strange

that from their cold’st neglect / My love should kindle to inflamed respect. / Thy dowerless

daughter, King, thrown to my chance, / Is queen of us, of ours, and our fair France” );

besides the fact that France is an accomplished ladies’ man who knows exactly what to say

when he wants to get a girl (“Will you have her? / She is herself a dowry”); besides all these

factors, there is a very simple formal device that indicates to us, the audience, which is the

side we should cheer for (France’s, of course). This almost banal device is having the

audience first hear the duke of Burgundy, and only after that, the King of France. Even if this

is not a law, the last one to speak usually leaves us the strongest impression. If this is true

also for a banal exchange of points of view, it will be much truer when, after hearing some

business considerations which do not take Cordelia herself in the least regard, we listen to

some fine poetry that reminds us of the conventions of amour courtois.

Thus, we - the spectators and readers - will not stand for Burgundy. Even if this

seems normal according to a modern audience’s horizon of expectations, there is something

curious to be noticed about it. Shakespeare was bourgeois himself, he was a talented

businessman (not just in the theatre, but in several fields of activity), and still, in this excerpt

he leads us not to identify with the one character that is actually closer to him (and us).

The structure of the scene makes us favour characters like France and Cordelia, who

present the discourse of a ruling class to which neither Shakespeare nor the majority of his

audience belonged to. And, unlike the Romantics who were nostalgic of something they

never experienced and just fantasized about, this feudal past was not remote for the

playwright and his contemporaries. It was quite recent, it left many traces still to be perceived

in the years to come, and mainly - and this is what I would like to call your attention to -,

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the social class to which Shakespeare belonged to was to collide frontally with the feudal

nobility within three decades. And in spite of this, the scene makes us closer to characters

that belong to a social class which did not share the same interests with the author (and the

majority of the Globe’s audience). Let us keep this question in mind, let us not come to easy

answers at this moment, let us observe some further aspects of the play before coming to grips

with this matter.

Let us see now a point that concerns not only this play, but drama in general: there is

no such a thing as a character in itself; we can only analyze a character in his relationship to

the other ones in the play. It is the character’s sum of actions and reactions in relation to the

other ones - what he tries to achieve from the other characters, and what these ones try to

achieve from him -, which gives us the whole picture about him. Thus, each and every scene

must be analyzed in relational terms, considering the interaction of the characters. So it is not

only what France and Burgundy say and do that establishes the difference between them, but

also the way Lear relates to each one. The manner he addresses one and other helps setting a

clear distinction between the two characters, even if we, spectators and readers, are not aware

of this technical aspect. More than that, it also provides elements for a political evaluation of

Lear and the play in general.

It is worth noticing that Lear addresses each of the suitors, France and Burgundy, in

the manner peculiar to each character. If we come back to the two bits of dialogue above, we

see that Lear also makes use of the negotial tone so characteristic of Burgundy: he talks of his

daughter’s fallen price, he tells Burgundy all her wealth (that is, none) - in fact, he talks like

an honest merchant who makes it clear for his customer that all he has got to offer for the

moment, is a devalued commodity. In contrast, when he addresses France, Lear is all-

emotional. He does not talk about price, but about merit and worth.

Up to this moment, one could say that this fact I am talking about shows nothing more

than the author’s good dramatic skills. Good playwrights know that a character needs to

adapt the strategies he uses to achieve his objectives according to the way circumstances

change around him. Lear probably knows who he is dealing with, either because he has

already been with the two suitors beforehand, or because he has got good information about

them. Thus, if he wants to punish Cordelia all the way, he needs to dishearten each of the

suitors in their own terms - he is looking for the best reasoning he could use for each one to

give up Cordelia.

However, there is more to it. If we keep the whole scene I.1 in mind, we know that

Lear does not have to make an effort to reach France’s tone - he is at home with that, he is

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being authentic (we know this from the rest of the scene and the play, where he acts in

accordance to the feudal tenets). They are both medieval kings who share the same mindset.

Still, however unyielding Lear might be, he shows that he can somewhat adapt to Burgundy’s

way, which is definitely not his own. And this is important - Lear at least tries to mimetize

Burgundy’s negotial manners, something that neither France nor Cordelia could even think of

doing (let alone Kent).

Lear is making an effort to do things in another way, a negotial one. In that, he

differentiates from his counterparts who cannot conceive at all of another manner of

managing the kingdom’s interests. Thus, Lear sends shockwaves all around not just because

he is an egotist tyrant who is blind to his daughter’s suffering (and he is), but also because he

is trying a mixed approach in his final days as a monarch. As we are going to see, though,

this new approach is not useful for Lear. It would require some ability for longtime planning

and a strategic view of the kingdom’s matters - and none of those is for him, for they were

not regarded as qualities in his times. (Of course, if we go for the historical record, we will

see that, in fact, the more talented medieval kings developed some sophisticated planning and

dealt with politics, even if politics was something completely different in the Middle Ages.

However, I am talking here of a more generalized, popular perception of kings which

prevailed not only in Shakespeare’s times, but in our own. And according to it, Renaissance

kings would be more like politicians - gossipy and cunning -, while feudal kings would be

more authentic. These last ones did not lose much time with empty talk: according to such a

representation, they lived by the sword, and acted according to their hearts.)

Lear is a feudal king at heart: attending his kingdom’s matters in a modern,

Renaissance style is beyond his scope. We are going to see the consequences of this in a

while. Let us proceed with the scene (I.1.222-60),

Cordelia - I yet beseech your Majesty, / If for I want that glib and oily art / To speak and purpose not, since what I well intend / I’ll do’t before I speak - that you make known / It is no vicious blot, murder, or foulness, / No unchaste action or dishonoured step / That hath deprived me of your grace and favour, / But even for want of that for which I am richer: / A still-soliciting eye, and such a tongue / That I am glad I have not, though not to have it / Hath lost me in your liking. Lear - Better thou / Hadst not been born than not t’have pleased me better. France - . . . My lord of Burgundy, / What say you to the lady? Love’s not love / When it is mingled with regards that stands / Aloof from th’entire point. Will you have her? / She is herself a dowry. Burgundy - Royal King, / Give but that portion which yourself proposed, / And here I take Cordelia by the hand, / Duchess of Burgundy.

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Lear - Nothing; I have sworn, I am firm. Burgundy - I am sorry, then, you have so lost a father / That you must lose a husband. Cordelia - Peace be with Burgundy. / Since that respect and fortunes are his love, / I shall not be his wife. France - Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich being poor, / Most choice forsaken, and most loved despised, / Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon. / Be it lawful I take up what’s cast away. / Gods, gods! ‘Tis strange that from their cold’st neglect / My love should kindle to inflamed respect. / Thy dowerless daughter, King, thrown to my chance, / Is queen of us, of ours, and our fair France. / Not all the dukes of wat’rish Burgundy / Can buy this unprized precious maid of me. / Bid them farewell, Cordelia, though unkind; / Thou losest here, a better where to find.

Cordelia’s speech being placed right after France’s is another element which helps the

audience have France in better regard than Burgundy. It also enables us to see that justice is

on her side. This observation might seem redundant, but it is not. We have already seen that,

despite her outstanding qualities, the King’s youngest daughter should not be seen as an angel

or as a suffering Christ-like character. She is actually arrogant, due to her awareness that she

not only belongs to England’s ruling class, but also that she is the King’s favourite daughter.

Let us recall Cartwright’s observation about the way Shakespeare makes use of an alternation

between engagement and detachment in this play, so that we empathize with some of the

characters, but at the same time are not overpowered by sheer emotion and can have a critical

appreciation of what is going on.

In Cordelia’s speech we have this aristocratic class despise for that portion of the

English nobility which foresaw a better future in forging alliances with the emerging

bourgeoisie - that is, a nobility which tried to acquire new habits and approaches in order to

tackle with the challenges of the future. (One could oppose that neither Burgundy nor France

are English. However, Shakespeare is not concerned with the precision of geographical or

historical details, but with the symbolic representation of the conflicts in his times’ England.

Consequently, he uses the characters mentioned in sources such as Holinshed and Spenser to

represent his own society.) We have another demonstration that Cordelia is noble in the

fullest sense of the word: she does not believe in pretending things in order to achieve her

objectives. Instead, she wants to be appreciated by her inherent (noble) value, which just

ought to be perceived by everybody - and if somebody does not perceive those inherent

qualities of hers, it is just because he is unworthy.

Coupled with this, though, we have a very humanizing feature: we see that Cordelia

understands she has fallen in disgrace - she is trying to plead in behalf of herself, while at the

same time she is struggling not to lose her dignity. This causes our empathy towards her, and,

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if she did not have such a beautiful speech right after France’s, we would probably perceive

her as just some stuck-up little princess. This humanizing feature is exactly what

differentiates her from a character like Kent. Unlike Cordelia, the earl does not show any

traces of frailty, nor whatever contradictory aspect that would make him seem more

tridimensional. (Even though, as I said, this more unilateral composition of Kent works to the

benefit of the play as a whole.)

(Here we have one of the elements that make scene I.1 such an outstanding example of

concision of the dramatic action. A few lines ago Cordelia was the King’s favourite, now she

has fallen in disgrace - “a wretch whom nature is ashamed”, in Lear’s words. Within the

space of one hundred and thirty lines - and, in the theatre, within a few minutes -, we are

able to grasp the whole trajectory of this character, and understand her disgrace.)

This is followed by Lear’s speech (“Better thou / Hadst not been born than not t’have

pleased me better”), which makes it very clear we are not facing some grieved poor old

father, but a tyrant who knows very well how to display his power. And here Shakespeare’s

construction one more time reminds us very much of a feature of Brecht’s V-effekt I have

mentioned before, according to which we have a character changing all the time within the

same scene, in a very contradictory way which does not leave room for any sort of lineal

development. A couple of minutes ago we witnessed Lear’s genuine suffering as a father, but

we cannot get empathic with him because we see the next minute that he is wont to use his

power in the most ruthless way - if Lear is to show his subjects who calls the shots in there,

he will do it even at the expenses of his favourite daughter. On the other hand, even if we

know he is a tyrant, we will not align with the ‘anti-Lear’ party, because we have previously

seen his suffering due to Cordelia’s behaviour, because of what we are going to see further in

the play (when we get to scene III.2, we cannot help empathizing with the poor old man who

faces the storm), and mainly, because we cannot empathize with his opponents’ methods.

And still, we are not likely to wish his restoration to power, since we have already

seen what sort of monarch he was. By sharply enhancing such contradictions of this character

as well as of the other ones, the author does not allow us to “buy” their view of things. We do

not align to any of them, and this allows us to have a wider view of the whole situation. Our

focus is directed to the condition of being a king at such times of brutal class struggle and

violent change, with all the social implications related to it (including being ruled by such

monarchs).

Shakespeare’s audience possibly did not have a clear picture of their own historical

moment, but in one way or another they must have perceived theirs was an age of transition.

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Being historically and geographically detached from that context, we know such transition

was characterized by a clash between the remaining forces of the feudal nobility - where the

monarchy rooted -, and the Renaissance ones (both the emerging bourgeoisie and the section

of the English nobility allied to it, which were paving the way for a full-fledged capitalism).

Thus, Shakespeare’s times are not clear-cut ones: like any other age, they have both features

of the past and of the future. The difference is that in those times the contradictions abounded

and did not point up to a clear future.

I would like to call your attention to another short utterance by Lear which also shows

the contradictions of this character. Such contradictions do not have only an individual

dimension - being Lear the fictional representation of a king, both the author and his

Jacobean audience would in one way or another relate this king to the institution of the

English monarchy and the contradictions it was facing. This utterance happens after

Burgundy suggests to Lear to give Cordelia her third part of the realm, so that he can marry

her,

Lear - Nothing; I have sworn, I am firm.

Here we have Lear as a truly medieval king. He might have tried before to address

Burgundy in the duke’s own terms, but that was still an effort to deal with somebody who is

different from him. However, even if Lear is more like Cordelia, France and Kent, there is a

feature which differentiates him from these other characters. When he previously tried to

reach out to Burgundy, he was actually trying to incorporate other elements, other manners of

action, to his last days of governing. He is a feudalist at heart, he is thoroughly convinced of

that ideology, but he perceives it might be useful to incorporate this ‘something’ which people

like Burgundy have got, and which Lear probably cannot define. This ‘something’ which

Lear feels around but cannot explain is the emerging bourgeois way of life and proceeding.

The aristocratic way of thinking in its purest form - feudalistic ideology - is not able to

provide any answers and solutions for the new problems that are arising, problems whose

solution require a very practical approach to things and an almost economic evaluation of the

relation cost-benefit inherent to each course of action. This new way of thinking and acting is

so alien to France, Cordelia and Kent that they cannot even notice its presence around. Lear

can, but he is not willing to change his stripes, and even if he did, he does not understand very

well what this new thing is. Even if he sincerely tried to be a Renaissance-like king, he

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would be prone to failure, since he does not understand the rules of the new game as well as

Goneril and Regan do, for instance.

Now, when Burgundy tries one more time to bargain, Lear will stick to a strict code of

conduct, according to which one’s honour must be regarded above other considerations -

Lear is now back to playing in his own turf. The problem is, his own turf is not the best one

in such an age of changes - he will probably not see things very clearly. Thus, the disasters

that follow are not due to some supernatural connection of terrible facts; they happen because

Lear is not able to fully understand this moment of transition, and consequently, of making

the right choices for the times that are coming ahead.

Cordelia’s departure is an indication for us to examine the next moment (I.1.266-81),

France - (To Cordelia.) Bid farewell to your sisters. Cordelia - The jewels of our father, with washed eyes / Cordelia leaves you. I know what you are, / And, like a sister, am most loath to call / Your faults as they are named. Love well our father. / To your professed bosoms I commit him; / But yet, alas, stood I within his grace, / I would prefer him to a better place. . . . Regan - Prescribe not us our duty. Goneril - Let your study / Be to content your lord, who hath received you / At fortune’s alms. You have obedience scanted, / And well are worth the want that you have wanted. Cordelia - Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides; / Who covers faults at last with shame derides. / Well may you prosper. France - Come, my fair Cordelia. [Exeunt France and Cordelia.]

There is a considerable dose of self-assuredness and even aggressiveness in Cordelia’s

farewell speech, which shows us that we cannot regard her as a frail, helpless victim. The

structure of this speech is interesting, because she alternates contents which are apparently

more delicate, with others that are more aggressive. She starts her utterance in a rather gentle

way, “The jewels of our father, with washed eyes / Cordelia leaves you.” (However, there

seems to be some quite ironic tone to this “jewels of our father”.) Then comes Cordelia’s

first blow, “I know what you are, / And, like a sister, am most loath to call / Your faults as

they are named.” She starts playing ‘nicey-nice’ again, “Love well our father. / To your

professed bosoms I commit him”. (We must keep in mind, however, that this “nice girl” is

behaving like a “little queenie”, and whatever she utters sounds like an imperial command.

This attitude is so natural for her, that, even after being rejected, she has not given up issuing

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orders to her sisters.) Then comes the next utterance, “But yet, alas, stood I within his grace,

/ I would prefer him to a better place.” Now this is some really aggressive line!

If we place Regan’s first line (“Prescribe not us our duty”) in a positional context, we

are going to notice that what she says is not necessarily evil or disproportionate. The

consequence is that Goneril and Regan will not end up looking like predecessors to

Cinderella’s evil sisters, as they have so often been depicted. Even if their course of action is

despicable, there is a certain logic and reason to it, as we are going to see. It is true that the

structure of this storyline reminds us very much of the fairy-tales, and this is one of the

reasons for King Lear being so attractive. It is also true that, even if there are nuances to the

characters, Shakespeare clearly presents two opposing groups that, yes, could be roughly

called “good” and “evil”. Nevertheless, King Lear does not have to be viewed as melodrama:

the plot is dangerously close to this genre, but the Folio treatment for characters like Goneril

and Regan is one of the elements which prevent this play from being characterized as such.

The manner the two excerpts above deal with our horizon of expectations is worth

being noticed. The passage with Lear and Burgundy ends with the exit of these two, and just

before that, with France saying, “Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich being poor, / . . . /

Thou losest here, a better where to find.” And in the last time she talks to her sisters,

Cordelia says just before her exit, “Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides; / Who

covers faults at last with shame derides. / Well may you prosper”. After that, she exits, and

we are left with her two sisters. The effect of these is that, while we watch Goneril and Regan

plotting immediately after Cordelia departed with those words, we strongly expect the

following things to happen:

a) The older sisters will do more evil (and our expectation is really met);

b) The wronged princess will come back, this time with a strong help from France, and a

terrible struggle will take place (one more time our expectation is met);

c) This time, around the end of the play, Cordelia will have the upper hand. With the help of

the good King of France, she will defeat the forces of evil and reestablish order, this time in a

more justly way (and in this case our expectation is not met at all).

Our familiarity with the conventions of such genres as the fairy-tale and the adventure

narrative - genres the play deals with - will generate the expectations above mentioned. I

have said before that the play generates such expectations all the time - and all the time we

are surprised when things do not happen as we believed they were going to. Sometimes these

expectations are broken immediately, as in the beginning of the play, when, after a couple of

lines about the division of the kingdom, Gloucester and Kent suddenly start talking about a

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base subject such as Edmund’s bastardy - and this is once again interrupted by Lear’s too

sudden entrance. Other times, it takes very long for an expectation to break, as in here. In

this last case, Shakespeare plants the seeds based on narrative conventions, and we will go all

through the play waiting for something to happen - and feel very surprised when this does

not occur. (The conventions of genre are more important in order to build expectations than

knowing the legend of Leir. Being so detached in time and space, we are not likely to know

this story; and yet, we build all the three expectations above mentioned, because of our

familiarity with the narrative schemes of the fairy-tales and the adventure narratives.) And

even when we are familiar with the play, and are reading it for the umpteenth time, we always

feel awed and awkward at such breaks. This happens because the author is able to make us

engage due to his mastery of such narrative conventions. So, either one way or the other, the

break of expectations is the play’s most distinctive structural feature. Other plays by

Shakespeare might also feature such breaks, but they are not central to the structure as here. I

would even say that such break of expectations is the central structuring element of King

Lear.

Now that Cordelia has exited, let us see what her two sisters are up to (I.1.282-304),

Goneril - Sister, it is not little I have to say of what most nearly appertains to us both. I think our father will hence tonight. Regan - That’s most certain, and with you; next month with us. Goneril - You see how full of changes his age is. The observation we have made of it hath not been little. He always loved our sister most, and with what poor judgment he hath now cast her off appears too grossly. Regan - ‘Tis the infirmity of his age; yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself. Goneril - The best and soundest of his time hath been but rash; then must we look from his age to receive not alone the imperfections of long-engraffed condition, but therewithal the unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them. Regan - Such unconstant starts are we like to have from him as this of Kent’s banishment. Goneril - There is further compliment of leave-taking between France and him. Pray you, let us sit together. If our father carry authority with such disposition as he bears, this last surrender of his will but offend us. Regan - We shall further think of it. Goneril - We must do something, and i’th’heat. [Exeunt]

Characters like Goneril and Regan have got nuances to their respective lines of action,

which do not justify what they do, but prevent us from seeing two “monsters of the deep”.19 I

said in the Introduction that this study does not deal with the differences between the Quarto

and Folio versions, but I must open an exception here and bring to you a difference from Q to

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F that is relevant to the study of the two older sisters. In fact, in Q Goneril and Regan (there

called Gonoril and Ragan) are more Cinderella’s-sisters-like, while their characterization in F

is more tridimensional.20 In the latter, we have real women (and not mere scolds) which have

got reasonably concrete fears concerning their father’s actions. They have got believable

worries, and consequently, they have got a cause, even if their acts are indeed evil. Besides,

there is a new feature to Goneril, not really present in Q, which is going to show up latter in

the play: here we have got a woman whose sexual needs are not being met. (Goneril’s

husband - Albany - is also a cuckold in Q, but there her adulterous behaviour seems to be

just another facet of her evilness, while here we might have a relatively ‘normal’ woman - as

normal as a murderous villainess can be - who is unhappy in her marriage.) This nuancing

of the older sisters is one of the aspects which make me go along with the majority of the

contemporary Shakespearean criticism, and prefer F to Q.

There are other elements which confer dramatic weight to Goneril and Regan and

prevent them from looking like cartoon characters. The older sisters perceive that, even if

Lear has just favoured them in the division of the kingdom, they might have “such unconstant

starts” from him - as Regan puts it. She seems to be right in assuming that, if he behaved

like that with such favourites as Cordelia and Kent, they might also have got it coming to

them in the near future. What calls our attention when they refer to such whimsical acts by

Lear is the fact that, despite the clear display of their rivalry towards Cordelia, they are

absolutely conscious that what their father did to her was unjustified (“He always loved our

sister most, and with what poor judgment he hath now cast her off appears too grossly”). This

is a very important detail. On the one hand, like some other before-mentioned aspects, it

humanizes the depiction of the two older sisters. On the other hand, this is what best

characterizes Goneril and Regan as evil people, and not “plain normal women”, as other

aspects from the passage above could lead us to think. They are absolutely conscious that

Lear behaved in an unjustified way towards Cordelia and Kent, and has thus assigned them a

terrible future. And this nuance which makes them so human - and not “monsters of the

deep” -, is also what shows us their wickedness: they saw injustice taking place; they clearly

perceived it could have happened to them; they could have tried to prevent it; and yet, they

decided to let the opponents of their material interests be expelled from the kingdom.

We could say that the older sisters show aspects of normalcy and of justifiable

behaviour before a situation of possible oppression, and at the same time they display an

absolute lack of compassion and a premeditate attitude. Both aspects, positive and negative,

illuminate each other, and, more importantly, contradict each other.

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Contradiction. I believe it is accurate to say Shakespeare preceded the aesthetic

conquests of psychological realism by creating characters as tridimensional as possible (N.B.:

I am not saying that the author practiced any sort of psychological realism, or that his works

should be examined according to such parameters. He was absolutely not realistic in the

stricter sense of the word. In spite of that, we can hardly name any other writer who has

created so many multifaceted characters.) These several facets of the characters in King

Lear, however, are not harmoniously or complementarily combined. The compositional

strategy for creating both scene and character in this play is one of assembling behavioural

and aesthetic contradictions side by side, and, instead of concealing them, actually calling our

attention to them. What goes on with Goneril and Regan is somewhat equivalent to what we

have experienced with Lear and Cordelia in the previous passages. This happens all

throughout the play, and is one of the reasons why one feels uneasy with this work, at least in

the first time he gets in touch with it: either we adore it in a Romantic manner, as an

expression of the ungraspable, or we think that, however creative it might be, there are several

- and serious - compositional problems to it (or we do both, in the manner of Bradley).

Goneril and Regan have definitely got another attitude as that of Lear, Kent, Cordelia

and France - and it is important to stress that this is not necessarily a matter of being good or

bad. They might belong to the ruling class of their fictional society, but we also feel that, like

Burgundy, in some way they do not belong exactly to that group. That is, they do not seem as

noble. Rather than being unbending as the other ones, they are extremely flexible - they can

walk the walk and especially talk the talk when they are required to, even if it is not what they

feel. Also, in the appropriate conditions they will be explicit about their material interests,

and not conceal them behind an idealized-ideological façade, as the members of the previous

group do. (This does not mean they are sincere - they are not. I am calling your attention

here to a compositional device. We have got this scene where they confess their material

interests, even if not too directly. Such a thing never happens to the characters of the other

group - even when they are left alone, they will never talk about such petty matters.) Third,

we see from the dialogue that they do not take it as a virtue to burst into rash action. They

observe almost methodically the object of their interest (in this case, Lear), they evaluate it,

and, that being done, they plan their course of action. Fourth, and as a consequence of the

first three, they have got a wider repertoire of action and strategies to achieve their objectives

than the other group does.21

If all this sounds rather bourgeois or Renaissance-like, or, even better, capitalistic, as

opposed to the other group (noble or medieval or feudalistic), this is meant to be so. Now of

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course neither of the older sisters is bourgeois, but I believe Shakespeare is little by little

introducing in the play a way of acting, thinking, and representing the world which is opposed

to that one of the outright medieval group of Lear, Kent and the like. That other group set the

initial tone of the scene, and we, as spectators or readers, take that tone to be the status quo of

the play’s fictional society. The opposing new way of thinking is first introduced in King

Lear by Burgundy, in a very slight way. We do not feel it as a disruption, but we see for the

first time a way of thinking and acting that differs from the other characters. It is important to

stress that the kind of conflict between France and Burgundy has got a different nature to it

than the conflicts between Lear and Cordelia, or Lear and Kent. These last two ones do not

oppose two different worldviews. Instead, when Kent or Cordelia argue with Lear, they are

actually disputing who best represents a worldview they all share in common. As for

Burgundy’s worldview, we can see it is really alien to that environment - France does not

even seem to understand what Burgundy is talking about.

So, after Burgundy, we have this short moment when Goneril and Regan are left

alone, and this other way of thinking makes itself somewhat more present in the play, but it is

still on the fringes. As the play proceeds, this worldview makes itself progressively more

present.

An impressive feature of King Lear’s structure is its accuracy in presenting the

movement of History in an aesthetic manner: the succession of different social systems does

not happen through a mere substitution of one for the other. Instead, we have the collapse of

a social system due to its own internal contradictions. Certainly the social classes that oppose

this system will do their best to accelerate this process, and thus, we need two conditions to be

present so that a new social order succeeds a preceding one: a) The existing system must

have been corroded by its own inner contradictions, so that it does not have enough stamina to

last much longer; b) The social classes that oppose this system must be very strong and

organized - that is, prepared to take over when the moment happens. The action and attitude

of the bourgeoisie in the early Modern Age is a good example of that. Even if they were not

completely content with the governing power, they were certainly not willing to counter it,

and be jailed or killed for that. They had to play the game of the ruling class, and try their best

to win that game by subverting its rules to their own benefit, which is what was happening

with the absolutist monarchies throughout Europe. In doing that, the bourgeoisie showed

more flexibility and better capability of changing their course of action than the feudal

nobility, with its rigid sticking to obsolete codes that would not provide a feasible answer for

the present moment.

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How is this presented in the play? We do not have there, right from the beginning, an

outright conflict between these two different social groups (that is, “medieval nobility” x

“Renaissance nobility plus bourgeoisie”). Actually, the conflict starts between Lear and his

two most cherished people, Cordelia and Kent. Goneril, Regan and their respective husbands

(as well as Edmund, whom we are going to study in the next chapter) are on the sidelines, just

watching and not actively taking part in it. And this organization of the plot is very similar to

the historical process: in History there was never such a thing as the bourgeoisie declaring an

open war to feudalism from the very beginning. Instead, this system collapsed due to its own

contradictions. Just like in the play, the bourgeoisie started waiting on the sides, until there

came the moment when it seized the opportunity to give the feudal nobility its final blow.

The last thing to say about this dialogue of Goneril and Regan refers to its form - it is

written in prose. There are countless switches in King Lear from blank verse to prose, and

vice-versa. I am not going to deal with all of them, since there is no space in this thesis for

that, and also because not all these changes are to be explained sociologically. However, this

is the exception to confirm the rule (like the initial dialogue), and I would like to risk a

sociological hypothesis for that. One could feel tempted to attribute this change to Goneril

and Regan’s deceiving strategies: they speak verse in front of Lear because this is required to

please him and be favoured by him; afterwards, they speak in prose because nobody is

watching them, and so they can show their true colours. This is not altogether wrong, but I

believe there is a lot more to it. I take the switch from blank verse to prose to be a more

consciously political indication. Prose is rather plebeian language; of course, the two sisters

did not cease being noble, but this would be an aesthetic way of quickly indicating to a

Jacobean audience - an audience pretty much used to theatrical aural conventions - that

their acting and thinking in this moment do not belong to a properly courtly world. In other

words, it would indicate in an aural and subtle way the intermission of something that is not

proper to that order.22

I said previously that Shakespeare presents Burgundy in a clearly unfavourable light,

and we definitely cannot cheer for Goneril and Regan, even if we understand their reasons.

Let us keep in mind that it is puzzling how the author, a member of the bourgeoisie, leads the

spectator to develop more empathy for the ‘feudal’ characters (even if the estrangement and

detachment devices make us critical also of these characters). It is not the case of trying to get

an answer right now, just of keeping this question in mind, and going along with the play. By

understanding better its structure, we might then arrive to a conclusion later on.

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Speaking of structure, along this chapter I tried to point out that many of the most

important compositional features of King Lear are concentrated in scene I.1. Now that we

have finished analyzing the different moments of this scene, it is the proper time to discuss

one more aspect of the play that is strongly present in I.1, and which is especially responsible

for the impression we get from King Lear: in those few pages there is a tremendous profusion

of data which makes it difficult to understand immediately what is going on. It is not that we

are not able to understand - we do, but we are left with the impression that, whenever we are

getting acquainted with some information or a character, the situation changes into something

completely different from what we were seeing or reading some minutes ago. Another factor

that contributes to this difficulty is that the play - and particularly this scene - abounds with

important and weighty characters.

It is true that Shakespeare’s plays always present several characters, and that the

author generally cares enough about all of them, so as to raise our interest also to the lesser

ones. Nevertheless, his plays usually present two well-defined groups: the central characters,

and the others which gravitate around them. The plethora of important characters in King

Lear is an exception to this rule. Coupled with the enormous quantity of ever-changing

events, this characteristic is responsible for our perception - even if only on a subconscious

level - that we are not witnessing the story of a single character. Instead, what we witness is

the story of a whole collectivity. The political and aesthetic implications of this collective

dimension are to be seen in the next chapters. In order to do that, we must now deal with

another group of characters.

ENDNOTES

(1) This matter was regulated by the Salic Law, a body of traditional law which governed the Salian Franks and was codified in the early sixth century. It underwent several changes, and was brought into use in England by the Norman conquerors from 1066 on. An interesting detail about the Salic Law is that it made clear that an individual had no right to protection if he was not part of a family. (2) On this subject, it is worth reading Miriam Gilbert’s essay ‘Performance Criticism’ (in Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide). Among other things, she examines Deborah Warner’s 1990 staging of the Q version of King Lear with the National Theatre (pp. 550-3), and especially an aspect of Q’s IV.7, which is Kent being in scene even if silent, and the importance that this detail has in Warner’s construction of meaning in this scene and on the play as a whole (especially on p. 551). (3) On this specific matter, see Brecht’s essay ‘Uma Nova Técnica de Representação’ (translated by Klaus Schell), p. 172, in the volume Teatro

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Dialético: Ensaios. (4) Actually, the Q and F versions differ about that. Q presents this in a way which

seems more like sheer voluntarism, since Lear does not explain the reasons for his action. In the F version Lear explains his decision, thus providing his action a clearer political content, and this is consequently kept in all the conflated editions. (5) See Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘O Narrador: Observações Sobre a Obra de Nikolai Leskow.’ In: Textos Escolhidos: Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer,

Theodor W. Adorno, Jürgen Habermas. (6) The Polish critic Andrzej Zurowski puts this in a very nice way, “In Shakespeare, everything is told, but nothing is told to the end. Shakespeare is always asking us to give him birth.” (See Is Shakespeare Still Our Contemporary?, p. 171, edited by John Elsom.) (7) A quite recurrent situation in such fairy-tales is that of a father who has got three

daughters which undergo a challenge common to all of them, and, of course, achieve different results. The customary practice of the times these fairy-tales were generated - which was probably still prevailing in Shakespeare’s time -, was that of attributing the precedence in any such competitions to the eldest child. The fairy-tales usually subvert this practice and present the youngest daughter as the worthiest, and thus, the winner. (8) It must be said that the Q version enhances this impression of Cordelia as a sufferer due to the presence in there of idealized accounts of her exile. These were excised in the F version, which presents a more determined and warrior- like Cordelia - a facet which is not absent in Q, but is not so clear, either. Since the conflated editions keep all of both texts (and thus, the above- mentioned excised passages), a reader might have a more Christ-like impression of Cordelia. This might explain why Cordelia-the- sufferer is such a frequent sight on stage. (9) See Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, Chapter 1, p. 95.

(10) See David Crystal’s essay ‘The Language of Shakespeare’, pp. 73-4, in Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide. (11) See Chapter 7 in Foakes’ Hamlet Versus Lear, especially pp. 182-3 and 203. (12) The German critic Peter von Becker puts it this way, “[The French director Arianne Mnouchkine] wanted to make Shakespeare less comfortable and more strange again, and so bring out the fundamental fury, terror and emotion, which proceed from Shakespeare’s dramatic use of ‘suddenness’. Suddenly, somebody changes tack and suddenly somebody decides to throw aside his wife, because of a sudden jealousy or something like that; and the whole world turns suddenly into a tragedy or a comedy. This is one reason why Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist, the abrupt changes of direction in his dramaturgy.” (See Is Shakespeare Still Our Contemporary?, p. 90, edited by John Elsom.) (13) This observation applies only to the F version which is being used as the basis for this thesis. As we saw in the Introduction, explanatory and moralizing accretions abound in Q, and are consequently kept in the several conflated editions, which, for this reason among others, constitute a more blurred material for the reader. (14) Brecht makes use of this same moment in I.1 - Lear’s rage - to explain his concepts of historicity and the V-effekt (in his essay ‘O Teatro Experimental’, translated by Roberto Franco de Almeida, in Teatro Dialético: Ensaios, pp. 135-8). The conclusions he draws from the scene are different from the ones I present here - even if mine are also in Brecht’s lines -, and I believe one complements the other. He says that there is no such a thing as an eternal essence of “Man”, and thus, of “Choler”. By this, Brecht means that the scene

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should be represented in a way so as to enable the spectator to perceive that Lear’s choler is not a mandatory reaction – it is connected to a specific man who lives in specific historical circumstances. Thus, the representation should allow the spectator to perceive in a critical manner that Lear’s choleric reaction is not “natural” and “essential”, and thus, other reactions would also be possible. (15) The intention of preventing future strife, which is present in the F version (in I.1.43-4), is absent in Q. This is an aspect which confers more historical concreteness to F. (16) See Peter Thomson’s essay, ‘Conventions of Playwriting’, p. 47, in Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide. (17) This single line of Albany and Cornwall is a Folio accretion which achieves a brilliant effect in terms of both nuance and trajectory of the characters. The spectator cannot tell Albany from Cornwall, for the villainous Cornwall shows himself performing a good deed right at this moment. Since there is no contradiction between the dukes, it will be up to the audience to make out much further in the play what this character is really into. (The equivalent opposite to this would be the development of Albany. He seems a villain - or, at least, a despicable upstart - in the play’s first scenes, and reveals himself to be a “good” character only in the last moments. As for my opinion about him, I happen to agree with those critics who understand that Albany in the F version is a dubious character, not much more than a turncoat. For a commentary on different perceptions about Albany among the divisionist critics

- none of them too flattering, anyway - see Gary Taylor’s essay ‘King Lear: The Date and Authorship of the Folio Version’, p. 425, in The Division of the Kingdoms.) (18) One well-known example of a work written according to such a tendency is G. M. Trevelyan’s English Social History, mentioned in Works Consulted. (19) This is a phrase present in a speech of Albany in Q (IV.2.48), which was excised in the F version. It does not refer directly to Goneril and Regan, but to a state of final chaos in which men would prey on each other. Nevertheless, one can find this expression and other equivalents as adjectives commonly used for Goneril and Regan. Coleridge, for instance, refers to “the monster Goneril”. (See his comment on p. 40, in Shakespeare: King Lear: Macmillan Casebook Series, edited by Frank Kermode.) (20) It is worth reminding that divisionist critics, such as Randall McLeod, believe that the conflations give birth to a shapeless creature - for example, due to the mixture of Q and F, we cannot really differentiate Goneril from Regan. (See Randall McLeod’s essay ‘Gon. No more, the text is foolish’ in The Division of the Kingdoms.) (21) There is no significant change in this passage concerning both Q and F versions. The only exception, and an important one, is Goneril’s second line in her penultimate utterance, “Pray you, let us sit together”. This is how it reads in F, which provides the basis for this thesis, and so was it kept here. In Q, however, it reads, “Pray, let’s hit together”. This is not just a stylistic alteration, for the content changes completely. Randall McLeod, for instance, favours F concerning this change. He says that, by having “sit together”, F provides more nuance for Goneril – at this moment she is a woman “off balance, thinking on her feet in an attempt to grasp an unprecedented situation . .”. (See Randall McLeod’s essay ‘Gon. No More, The Text is Foolish’, pp. 169- 70, in The Division of the Kingdoms.) Although I go along with McLeod in his preference for F over either Q or the conflation, I have a couple of moments in which I prefer the Q solutions, and this is one of them. McLeod says that “sit together” is more coherent with the F treatment for Goneril and Regan, where they cease being shrews, and become somewhat closer to normal women - they are going to discuss the subject and get to a solution. As for me, I believe

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we should not look for a realistic coherence in King Lear, since behavioural and aesthetic contradictions abound in such a manner that I take this to be the play’s specific compositional method. According to this spirit, I think it is not the best solution to depict Goneril and Regan as two ladies who are going to sit over a cup of tea and discuss. Thus, “hit together” reads better. If the play’s structure is based on contradictions, it goes better with its aesthetic procedure to have the two women commenting the rash actions of their father in a horrified way, and right after that, deciding to attack. I also agree with divisionist critics such as McLeod and Gary Taylor that F is superior to the conflations, since the latter’s mixture of both versions renders the text too long, less straight to the point and somewhat dragging. In spite of this, I believe that both G.K. Hunter’s and Kenneth Muir’s conflated editions arrived to the best solution for this problem. These editions also adopt F as the stylistic basis for their work (as conflations generally do), but in this case they understood it was better to adopt Q’s “hit together”. So, they combined the aggressiveness of Q’s “Pray, let’s hit together” and the musicality of F’s “Pray you, let us sit together”, and arrived then to “Pray you, let us hit together”. (22) See Peter Thomson’s ‘Conventions of Playwriting’, p. 47, in Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide.

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